The
doctor gently removes the girl’s small feet from the stirrups and covering her
once more with the shift winds up his routine in the emptied room, attempting
to locate again his once-held conviction in the validity of this thankless
task, grown weary of the wish for himself and this girl and those others as
found themselves in the same sorry predicament each to endure no suffering
further than that intrinsic to this room and their current self.
He
is daily exhausted by the placards and collective chanted curse declaring him
to be in the employ of the Devil, that sensed threat of risk posed to himself
and to the women mushroomed to where he knows each accumulant to be one less
left, now counting down to the last with this the acknowledged penultimate, aware
too he would be granted no more mercy at the end for the clinical sterility in
which he had worked than those as had excavated in alleyways with coathangers
or copper wiring, and his imposition significant only as a single fist raised
in anger against God, out of competition with whom he was about to bow, saying
Doctor:
As if you let them all live anyway yourself.
He
places the E.T. doll back beneath the sedated weight of her arm, its squat form
nuzzling at the anaesthesia of its passive clamp proffers only dumb comfort to
this girl whose hips are of no real depth for bearing children.