Page 46 - WTP VOl. XIII #2

Via’s alarm goes off but she doesn’t open her eyes. She whips her arm out of the blankets, dragging her fingertips against the nightstand until it touches the edge of her phone, where she taps the stop button.
It’s only when her second alarm trills that she opens her eyes. Via hisses when her feet hit the floor. She hates being cold first thing in the morning, but she also thinks that people who sleep with socks on are sick in the head.
A lot of people, especially back in med school, as- sumed that she’s an avid coffee drinker—perhaps because of the wideness of her eyes, maybe from her jilted language, but she’s not. Sometimes Via’s been tempted by coffee, but she actively refuses to suc- cumb if only because she’s addicted to subverting people’s expectations of her.
Her morning routine, instead, tends to go like this. 7:01: first alarm
7:08: eyes open alarm
7:09: pee and just sit there for a second
7:11: brush teeth while laying out the clothing for tomorrow because today’s is already on the dresser
7:14: splash water on face 7:16: clothing on
7:20: brush hair while getting lunch prep out of the fridge (rice chicken broccoli)
That leaves her exactly a second to examine herself in the mirror before she has to book it out of her house to catch the bus. That’s how she likes it. After all, her face always looks the same; dark hair, a mole on the right side of her nose, one wide, nearly black eye, and the other—well, she really doesn’t need to know what the other eye looks like today, because Via’s certain it looks the same as it did the day before, as it has the past twenty-four years. Filmy and white and if she forgets to rub the sleep out of it, kind of crusty.
She knows what it looks like. She doesn’t need to look at it again.
Via knows what it looks like. She also knows what it looks like when other people are looking at it. People get a little cross-eyed when they’re looking up at her from the hospital bed. Then she goes muscle-memory and plugs the needle in and their eyes flutter shut, and in her more self-destructive moods she gets all up-
set that they probably go to sleep thinking about her weird-looking eye. But then Via remembers how they look when they’re cross-eyed and she feels less bad.
Usually the folks in middle-age take her eye the worst because they really try and look at both eyes and the rapid-fire back-and-forth dance their eyes do gives Via motion sickness. Today her patient is this guy named Felix whose eyes are moving so rapidly she’s gone on autopilot, her brain fixated on the vein, the angle, the pressure. As far away from the dance as she can get.
“How are you doing today.” All of Via’s words end in a period.
“I’m good!” It seems all of Felix’s end in exclamation points, his voice a little higher than she assumes is natural.
“Good.”
“Yeah.” His voice trembles a little.
Via’s hands, agile, get the propofol measured out. “You scared of needles or anything like that?”
There’s a pause which unfortunately forces her to get out of her little routine and play at bedside manner. “Everything okay, Felix?”
Felix seems to get smaller, greener, more frightened. “I’m just a little nauseous.”
“Do you need us to pause for a second?” And now, unfortunately, she has to make eye contact with Felix. He’s like fucking prey, shaking and sad behind a log, and in some weird part of her brain Via’s picturing herself as a big ass wolf and she’s not going to eat this guy—she doesn’t need to get on medication— but Felix a louse and he’s so bad at being functional that he can’t even run.
Felix, the human, shakes his head. His beady little eyes fixate on Via’s eye, and then his jaw unlatches, and a thick, dark stream of vomit sprays out of his mouth.
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