Far From The Madding Crowd

It starts with a smell. Not of bleach. Of cloth. Damp wool. Rusted metal. Daniel’s hands are pressed to the tile. He doesn’t remember kneeling. The floor is warmer than it should be. The light is wrong. Pale, yellowed, humming from a long tube above. He lifts his head. The room is too tall. The

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The trolley rattles as it’s wheeled in. Glass ampoules. Gauze. Syringes laid out like surgical bones. A shallow metal bowl of sugar water sits beside a box of gloves. Everything is quiet except the tick of the clock, which is five minutes slow and always has been. Unwin is young here. Still learning. His badge

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We ate on the floor always. Not because we didn’t have a table – we did technically, though you couldn’t see it. It has vanished beneath topographical maps, broken lamps, a box of obsolete dental moulds, and a rotary phone that no longer rang. To clear it would have felt like a betrayal. As though

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