Special Treatments Ward

I So this is where the children come to die, hidden on the hospital’s highest floor. They wear their bandages like uniforms and pull their iv rigs along the hall with slow and careful steps. Or bald and pale, they lie in bright pajamas on their beds, watching another world on a screen. The mothers spend their nights inside the ward, sleeping on chairs that fold out into beds, too small to lie in comfort. Soon they slip beside their children, as if they might mesh those small bruised bodies back into their flesh. Instinctively they feel that love so strong protects a child. Each morning proves them wrong. No one chooses to be here. We play the parts that we are given—horrible as they are. We try to play them well, whatever that means. We need to talk, though talking breaks our hearts. The doctors come and go like oracles, their manner cool, omniscient, and oblique. There is a word that no one ever speaks. II