Karen couldn’t stop screaming, even though they must have taken that man who’d been jerking off out of her room when she’d passed out, yet again, at the sight of…
Frank, her Frank! All this time she’d thought she had to forgive him for a murder he hadn’t committed, because, somehow, that skinny, effeminate, little Brit Martin must have turned the tables on Frank and it was Frank who was…
Karen screamed and screamed until a nurse finally came in.
Frank! Dead! Endless memories of their making love in his apartment in Sausalito cut through her like a swarm of knives. For all the pain of thinking he was mad at her, for all the pain of thinking she would never see him again, none of this was anything at all compared to the finality of his being…really, actually…dead.
She screamed one long, loud, endless scream. Vaguely she noticed that the nurse was preparing an injection.
Dead! It was only in the face of Frank’s death that Karen realized that no matter how convinced she was that she would never see him again there had always been at least a teeny chance for something she now realized could not possibly happen ever, not even in her dreams.
The nurse was fiddling impatiently with her IV and dropped something that shattered on the floor. “Will you please stop screaming?”
Vaguely Karen remembered something she’d read off her phone once about this being the worst hospital in the city.
“That ‘transsexual’ sick perv, who is an affront against the Lord Jesus Christ, is gone,” continued the middle-aged nurse. “So you have nothing to scream about.”
Something must have gotten into her IV, a lot of something, because Karen could feel herself losing consciousness what struck her as way too fast. She thought she heard herself mumbling something about how that wasn’t a real transgender person, only a “sick perv” of a heterosexual man.
“Okay, this time I’m going to get an injection in your IV, and this time it’s enough to knock out an elephant. Not spending the rest of my shift listening to this nonsense!”
Karen felt like she was on an elevator that’s cables had just snapped and was now plummeting down a hundred stories. Her last thought was for Frank. Whether or not he’d ever forgiven her or she’d ever seen him again, how unbearable that he had lost his life.
