Sex, death and a snake in the grass: 19 linked short stories, fiction for the Internet. Read in narrative sequence using the left-hand menu or follow characters through the in-page links
17
Debbie knelt on the bed, her dress rucked around her knees. Using the arms of the man's body as the fulcrum, she expertly manipulated him onto his side so that Comfort, the student, could wash his back.
There was blood on the sheet and on the man's back, and Comfort was being too slow. Debbie could hardly restrain herself from grabbing the sponge and doing it herself.
At last Comfort was done. They rolled the man one way and then the other, first pulling out the dirty sheet and then tugging a clean one through with the weight of the man's body.
Perhaps Debbie pulled a little too hard. As the body jounced onto its back, its jaw dropped open. A strangulated bubbling gasp came out of the mouth. Comfort stepped backwards, her hand rising to her own mouth in horror.
Even Debbie was a little unnerved. By some trick of rigor the eyes had fallen open. Under the fluorescent lighting the corpse stared back at them from its hollow, bearded face.
The two women looked at each other. Debbie thought briefly of her own first time with death: the fascination of it, the sudden smallness of the dead body, the peculiar feeling at the back of your neck as if someone were watching you.
She shook herself out of it. 'It's ok, Comfort. Look, come here. Help me.'
Gingerly at first, they washed the man's front. They closed his eyes and Debbie showed Comfort how to bind the jaw together with a strip of bandage.
When they had finished and Jake's body lay stretched out under the shroud, bathed in the soft light of the bedside lamp, the atmosphere in the room seemed more peaceful.
Debbie asked Comfort to ring the mortuary. Then she went round the ward, closing all doors and drawing curtains around the beds. When the porters had taken the body away the two nurses sat drinking tea at the nurses' station until daybreak came slanting through the windows.
