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In her first semester of college, she’d taken an art class. Not that she’d wanted to, but it was one of the requirements outside of her normal biology course load. At the time, she’d argued with her counselor, telling her that art was a waste of her time. That she should instead be filling that slot with something that pertained to her major.
But she’d lost that argument.
In the first class, she remembered the professor showing them a slide show of watercolor paintings. One of the paintings was a field of flowers, and in the foreground, it showed a batch of them up close. They had red petals that were dark around the edges, but lightened and became more translucent in some other areas.
It bothered her, picturing the painter leaving a puddle of painted water in the dark areas to get that effect.
It felt inefficient. Unnecessary.
And now, for some reason, the only thing she could see when she looked at the streaks of blood covering her hands and arms, were those petals.
Those imperfect, inefficient red petals.
She rubbed her thumb and index finger together, watching the dried blood flake off and flitter to the ground like stained snowflakes.
She turned her hands over, staring at them like foreign objects.
They didn’t feel like her.
Shedidn’t feel like her.
A flash of memory from the last twelve hours went through her head.
Everything had been going smoothly until suddenly it wasn’t.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
She needed tools and equipment they didn’t have. She needed medication they didn’t have.
Sarah needed things that she couldn’t give. Her baby needed things she couldn’t give.
Sarah’s voice replayed in her head, and Saff tried desperately to shut it out. To silence the quiver in her words when she told her to just save her baby. To do whatever it took to make sure the baby was okay.
Saff lifted her bloody hands to her head, covering her eyes, pushing with every ounce of force against them, trying to block out the memory.
And then suddenly, instead of Sarah’s lifeless body, or her baby’s lifeless body, she saw one of her first patients. A man in his early forties that had been in a car accident. She saw the monitor flatline as his heart beat for the last time.
Then she saw Mason.
She saw his eyes losing their grip on the last bit of life they’d held onto for so long.
Then she saw her father.
His angry, sweat covered face. Tremors quaking through his body as he screamed at her. Screamed at her for being weak.Screamed at her for not having the guts to shoot him right away, before the transition started.
A wave of nausea rippled through her and she had to swallow down the stomach acid that threatened to come up.
“Oh, shit, is that from—“
Her eyes shot open, head snapping to look up at the familiar voice.
Dean stood a few feet away from where she was sitting on the bench she’d wandered to.
“Is that from,” he continued, nodding at her hands, “that pregnant chick?”
Saff looked back down at her hands.
Her eyes traced over the blood.
