Night-time in Ward 6C

The air is thick and viscous with the smell of antiseptic and spilled saline solution. Solid pre-war concrete walls reach several metres into the air in the old, high-ceilinged fashion that makes ventilation nearly unnecessary. It is plastered over with generations of white paint that have seen countless people live and suffer and die in its indifferent belly. This ward is no different from all the others above and below, save for the number of stairs, wooden and battle-scarred, leading to them.

An old man who eats from a drip, but dances in his dreams and sings behind his eyelids.

There is a child who says what the adults want to hear and is silent when they leave.

There is a woman who screams profanities at the doctor, who shrugs them off onto his clipboard.

The second old man stares out of his window and wishes for his family.

An old woman does not stop smiling and takes five minutes to climb into her wheelchair.

An empty bed has several possessions on its table. The dead do not need tumblers and notebooks. 

It is never truly quiet in the city, but in this building, the silence clamps your ears at night, the air so still you could swear it had turned into ice-glass. 

The hospital's only true constants are peace and pain and death and cash slips.