Page 247 of Coal Hearts

Dr Belford went to argue but then nodded. “You can’t take it down to your quarters, but you can use it while you’re here. Not my rules, you understand. If it were up to me, you could take every damn thing he’s given me and share it around.”

“I know.” Peter gritted his teeth and bundled me up. He wrapped me so tight, drawing the corners beneath my chin, he almost choked me.

Sighing heavily, he kissed my forehead and spoke to Dr Belford. “He used a clean blade. Shallow cuts. She didn’t bleed much.”

“How much is much?” Dr Belford asked.

“I think Victor ordered about five mil or so.”

“Good. At least she doesn’t need a transfusion.”

I shuddered.

The fact that she had the ability to do such a procedure painted horror stories in my head.

I huddled deeper into my borrowed blanket.

Opening a few drawers of her medicine cabinet, Dr Belford selected whatever she needed, then came to join us by the wall. Placing a small metal bowl, iodine, some antiseptic cream, and beige bandages and band-aids beside me, she looked at me carefully. “I need to tend to you, okay? I’m just going to slip the blanket down and the moment I’ve cleaned your wounds, you can have it back.”

I knew she spoke.

I saw her lips move.

I heard her words fall.

Yet...there was a strange kind of separation. A fog that wasn’t quite a fog. A silence that never quite faded.

I shivered as she glanced pointedly at Peter until he stepped away. Once he no longer clutched me in the blanket, she gently pushed it off my quaking shoulders and inspected the cuts Henri had given me.

Cold air licked me.

Pungent antiseptic stung me.

I didn’t look.

I just stared at nothing.

At a single speck of dust on the flagstones.

A speck that danced and morphed into tiny replicas of my past.

A teddy bear I’d given to Krish from my own collection.

A Barbie doll I’d dressed up in a matching saree when we went to our neighbour’s son’s wedding.

A quartz crystal tower that I used to meditate with that Father gave me on my tenth birthday.

The drugs still twisted my reality.

My thoughts still gluggy and nonsensical.

But they weren’t as chaotic as before.

Not as technicolour or fantastical.

While Henri cut me, I’d been swept away by them. Pinwheels and fireworks exploded over my vision as the pain in my body became colour in my fractured mind.

I’d sunk into those refractions.