Weekly Writing – June 22 2024

“All right, now. I want you to look at this and tell me what you see.”
She kept her scoff in the back of her throat, where the doctor wouldn’t hear it. She had already told him and the two before him what was wrong with her. Showing her pictures and asking her endless, circular leading questions was so obviously just their way of fishing for an answer they liked more.
She rolled her eyes towards where he must have been holding something up, another placard with an ink blot that was supposed to look like a dead childhood pet or a secret longing for someone to tell her she was special. Not that she could see it – whenever she tried to focus on something, that was when they swarmed to be front and centre in her vision instead.
“A dead woman,” she said. “Her throat’s been cut. It looks like her body’s been underwater for a while.”
Soft and white and swollen and mouthing silent pleas above the bloodless slit of her cut throat. The dead woman stood where the black, underwater billow of her hair only half-hid the massively unimpressed look on the doctor’s face.
“I can’t help you if you don’t cooperate with me,” he said.
“I am,” she told him, without any real hope left that he would hear it. The same way she could see only the dead, the doctors saw only what they expected of her. She sat out of reach behind their assumptions, crazy, attention seeker, while the dead woman, probably lying in the river just across the street from the doctor’s office, kept waving her fish-bitten arms and begging without a sound for someone to see her who would care.