‘You like horror stories right?’ asked Leonard with a smile, as he lit up another cigarette. He sat in the parking lot of the Opus Hospital with Marissa, watching the setting sun paint the buildings overhead a deep red. ‘Tell me a ghost story from Malaysia.’
Marissa shook her head and smiled. ‘You’re a very morbid one, aren’t you?’ she asked. He shrugged, not denying it. Leonard worked in the morgue, a job most people found unpleasant, but one that he found fit him fairly nicely. He had tried being a nurse like Marissa, but found that his bedside manner was lacking despite his technical expertise. Working with the dead was a perfect compromise. Seeing he wasn’t to be deterred, Marissa exhaled a puff of smoke. ‘I suppose it’s why I like you. Alright,’ she said.
Marissa was a petite girl of Southeast Asian descent. When not in her nursing scrubs, she let her waist-length black hair fall down her back in a cascade. Her dark skin, modest and secret smiles and small frame had been irresistible to Leonard when they had first met, and it hadn’t been long before they were taking smoke breaks together in the parking lot. He quickly found that they shared a love for horror movies and ghost stories. Leonard had promised himself he would ask her out. Any day now.
Marissa smiled mischievously. ‘You Westerners like vampires right?’ she asked. ‘We have a lot of different vampires in Southeast Asia, and none of them are sexy and suave either,’ she said with a teasing look. ‘At least, not for long.’
Leonard gave a good-natured grin. ‘I like the scary ones better anyway. So what are your vampires like? Do they wear capes? Do they live in old castles?’
‘Nothing so obvious,’ said Marissa. She stared off, as if recounting from memory. ‘In the Philipines you have the Aswang and the Manananggal, in Singapore, they fear the Pontianak and the Langsuir. None of those compares to the queen of them all,’ she said, with mock theatricality. ‘In Malaysia, our vampires are called Penanggalan. Those are the worst of them all.’
‘You lost me about five unpronounceable words back,’ said Leonard, taking another drag. Marissa gave a chuckle.
‘Penang-Galan’ she said, stretching out the word. ‘It means to detach, or to separate. Because, you see, the vampire looks like a normal person during the day, when it blends in with the rest of the village. But when the sun goes down, its head detaches, dragging all of its internal organs as it flies out, looking for blood.’
‘Wow,’ said Leonard, unable to keep the look of incredulity off his face. ‘That’s insane.’
Marissa giggled. ‘Is it any crazier than pale boys in leather seducing maidens in the night?’ she asked. Leonard nodded.
‘There’s different versions of the legend,’ continued Marissa. ‘You have to understand, these are folk tales passed down orally through the generations. In some versions, the Penanggalan can only be a woman, in others, she’s a demon born from a maiden who was interrupted mid-prayer, or a midwife who made a pact with the Devil. The details that remain the same though, are the flying head, the dangling intestines and the taste for blood.’
‘People believe these things exist right?’ asked Leonard. He was suddenly afraid of saying the wrong thing, in case he was being insensitive.
‘Some people do, some don’t,’ shrugged Marissa. ‘Most say it’s just old wives tales, or an excuse to drive away witches and spiritual healers. Still, you can find plenty of people who get extra scared at night when a baby has just been born,’ she said, with a smile. ‘They say that the vampire’s favorite type of blood is that of children.’
‘Do you believe in that sort of thing?’ asked Leonard, choosing his words carefully.
Marissa gave him a playful shove. ‘Ayah, Leonard,’ she said. ‘Of course I don’t. Do you believe in Dracula? Or the Boogeyman? These are just ghost stories for bored housewives and children.’
Leonard laughed along with her, finishing his cigarette and stubbing it out on the concrete. ‘You guys definitely have a….unique imagination,’ he said. He felt bad because it seemed crazy to him. The idea of a floating, bloodsucking head wasn’t scary, just stupid. Marissa could see the look on his face and burst out laughing.
‘It’s ok,’ she said, with a warm smile. ‘I can see you think it’s ridiculous. That’s what I thought when my Grandma first told me the story. Can you imagine what it would look like?’ she shook her head. ‘If you ask me, too much of Malaysia is still caught up in superstitions. It’s one of the reasons I left. They need to catch up with the rest of the world in the Twenty-First century.’
Leonard smiled awkwardly again as Marissa’s watch beeped, indicating her break was over. She got up and smiled again at him, banishing all thoughts of floating heads from Leonard’s mind and filling his stomach with butterflies. ‘We should go out sometime after work,’ said Marissa with a mischievous twinkle in her eye as she took one last drag and gathered her things. ‘Maybe get your mind off such morbid things.’
‘Definitely,’ stammered Leonard as Marissa breezed past him, giving him a final wave as she vanished into the stairwell, leaving him in the darkened parking lot. The sun had finally sunk behind the horizon, giving way to the cool night and the chirps of crickets. Leonard stared for a few moments out at the darkening sky and replayed the last few minutes in his head, unable to believe his luck.
---
It was midnight by the time Leonard was finally finished with his work. Most of the other hospital staff had been replaced by night-shift workers, who patrolled the wards and looked after the patients. Marissa was working late tonight, and as he finished packing up his things, he wondered if it would be weird to pop by the nurse’s lounge and say goodbye. In the morgue, he was surrounded by cold corpses packaged away in sterile, silver cabinets, neatly catalogued and organized. Most days, Leonard wasn’t a squeamish man, he couldn’t afford to be in his line of work, but tonight, there was something about the quiet, dimly lit and mostly empty hospital that gave him the creeps. He shook his head. All this talk of ghosts and vampires must have unnerved him more than he thought.
The morgue was in the basement, and Leonard walked through the fluorescent-lit hallways and up the empty staircase to the first floor. There were no cleaners around, and the nurses must have been occupied with their duties on other floors because Leonard encountered no one on his way up. A mischievous idea had entered his head as he passed by the darkened rows of beds containing sleeping patients on the ward. Marissa had often snuck up on him in the morgue during the night shift, and Leonard thought it might be time to finally return the favor. It might even be romantic or something, he thought to himself as he rounded the corner to the nurse’s lounge.
Marissa was standing at the counter, her back to Leonard as he reached the door, making herself a cup of coffee. The lounge was a large, empty room, with a wall-length window. It was lit by harsh, fluorescent lights, making sneaking up on her a difficult prospect. Leonard was about to abandon the idea when Marissa checked her watch and abruptly left her still-steaming cup of coffee, making her way to the exit at the far end of the lounge and vanishing up the stairwell. Leonard propped his bag down on a couch and followed her, the smile not leaving his face. It seemed like tonight he was having a streak of good luck.
Shadowing her, Leonard followed Marissa up three flights of stairs, before she finally exited on the maternity ward. This had confused Leonard, Marissa having no duties up there as far as he knew. The ward had several criss-crossing corridors, surrounding a large room rimmed on all sides with glass windows, where the newborn babies slept in separate cots. Leonard had never come up here before, not being a kid person himself, and paused as he followed Marissa, looking through the glass at the slumbering babies in the darkness.
A door closing at the end of the hall caught Leonard’s attention, and he followed, reaching a supply room. None of the lights were on in the ward, and Leonard had still encountered no night staff. Maybe Marissa had been covering someone else’s shift, he reasoned as he pushed the door open quietly. The room was dark, illuminated only by an open window, and in the corner, facing the wall, Leonard could just make out the familiar form of a petite girl in nursing scrubs, standing in a patch of moonlight.
The hairs on the back of Leonard’s neck stood on end as he stared. Marissa was facing the wall, not doing anything. She stood, still as one of the corpses that Leonard was used to seeing, and in a strange way, his brain couldn’t help but think of her as a corpse propped upright. He had been about to call her name, to reach out, when suddenly, her body jerked unnaturally as her head tilted upward and her neck muscles stretched like coiled snakes beneath her skin.
Leonard could do nothing but watch, bereft of speech and breath, as Marissa’s neck stretched, longer than any person’s, the skin tearing like plastic to reveal a grotesque blossom of naked muscle. A foul stench filled the room, sickly sweet, like rotting vinegar, that burned Leonard’s nostrils and made his eyes water. He stared, paralyzed, as he watched Marissa’s head, followed by a mass of bone and gore pull itself free from her body, hair dangling weightlessly around her face like a veil. Leonard watched her lungs swell out of her neck-stump like two crimson balloons, followed by dangling coils of glistening intestine that unravelled as they were pulled forth from the husk. Marissa’s headless body, cold, grey and now resembling a long-dead, though perfectly preserved corpse, twitched as it disgorged its contents into the air, before standing still.
The ghastly apparition did not waste time, floating languidly toward the ceiling tiles and slipping between them with no apparent resistance. The head and intestines folded themselves into gaps, vanishing like a worm burrowing into the earth. Leonard managed to pull himself into the room. The stench had grown worse, decay and musty rot mingling with the reek of sewage and the sickly-sweet smell of putrefying fruit. He could hardly breathe as he staggered over, not daring to make a sound, grabbing Marissa’s headless body. It felt cold and hollow, and though his eyes burned, he forced himself to look at the wound. His blood froze as he saw only darkness, as if Marissa had been hollowed out like a pumpkin.
Leonard pushed the body away from him, letting it slump against the wall, his revulsion growing as he looked at his hands and saw them wet with blood. It was brown and filled with rot and bits of flesh that clung to his skin. He backed slowly toward the door to the supply room, hardly believing what he was seeing. It had to be some kind of hallucination, his medical mind rationalized desperately. Maybe born of stress and listening to Marissa’s insane Malaysian folktales. He was probably dreaming, he thought, as he backed away from the body, out into the hallways of the maternity ward.
He was disabused of the notion when he turned around and saw the creature hanging, like a glistening sculpture of gore, in the air above the cots of the sleeping children. Leonard crouched, hiding beneath the large window as he watched the ghoulish figure, organs dangling from a ruptured neck-stump like a nightmarish jellyfish. The hair floated around the head, but in the darkness, Leonard could see Marissa’s face, eyes wide and milky white, skin pale and bloodless, mouth a gaping hole rimmed with rows and rows of fangs. As he watched, he saw tongues emerging from between those fangs, uncoiling like fat, red worms as they descended upon the sleeping babes. Like leeches, those feelers found the necks of the newborns and greedily swelled with fresh blood as the babies moaned and weakly struggled with discomfort.
Leonard’s mind was racing, and insanely, he remembered a line from Dracula. ‘Die Totden Reiten Schnell, the dead travel fast.’ Dracula had come to England, a land that had never heard of vampires to seek prey. It made sense, was inevitable, thought Leonard’s panicked mind, that vampires from other lands would seek new, unsuspecting feeding grounds as well. He couldn’t look away as the grotesque apparition fed, its organs swelling scarlet. As he watched, he almost swore he could see children’s faces and hands, thousands of them, struggling and pressing against the walls of the distended stomach.
His legs finally found strength as Leonard took off, racing for the stairwell and crashing down the flights of stairs. On his way, he reached for and pulled the fire alarm, filling the hospital with the sudden cacophony of whining noise. He dared not look behind him as he went, the stench of blood, rot and sewage following him throughout his flight, even as he ran back through the nurse’s lounge, past several surprised orderlies. He crashed through the doors of the hospital, lying on the tarmac, panting and crying, as the panicked nurses and orderlies crowded around him, trying to help him. Before he finally passed out, he thought he saw Marissa’s face staring down at him from a window, high above.
---
Leonard had been committed to a psyche-ward shortly after the incident. Firefighters had arrived to find him, unconscious outside the entrance of Opus Hospital, The night staff had been questioned extensively, and none of them had seen anything untoward beyond Leonard’s crazed behavior.
Leonard sat in his white, sterile room, so very much like the morgue he was used to with the exception of an open window that allowed sunlight in. he had been in the psyche-ward, under the care of professionals for three days now, recounting his story of vampires and floating heads uselessly to anyone who would listen. The consensus among the staff seemed to be that Leonard had suffered a total nervous breakdown, perhaps brought on by the stress of the job or the admittedly gruesome work of dealing with dead bodies all day and night. His co-workers had confirmed that he was a morbid sort of fellow, and it seemed the best for everyone concerned that he took some sick leave until he was feeling more together. Leonard sat by the window, staring out at the late afternoon sun that lit up the trees. He turned as he heard his door open.
Dr. Marston walked in with the usual array of anti-anxiety medication. ‘Leonard,’ he began with a warm smile. ‘You seem to be doing better. Are you sleeping well?’
Leonard shook his head. Dr. Marston gave him a pat on the shoulder. ‘We’ll have you out of here in no time,’ he said. ‘These are small steps on the journey toward rebuilding yourself.’
Leonard nodded as he wordlessly downed the pills. He relished the feeling of chemical relaxation, the only thing that allowed him even a small respite from the memories. He had given up talking to people who wouldn’t listen, part of his brain desperately wanting to believe it had all just been a fevered dream.
Dr. Marston smiled as he watched Leonard take the pills, before he got up. ‘Keep pushing forward, Leonard,’ he said, gently. He headed for the door, opening it, and then stopping, as if remembering something. ‘Oh right, and by the way,’ he said. ‘A new nurse has just been assigned to your wing, Marissa. I think you and her will get along just fine.’
Marissa shook her head and smiled. ‘You’re a very morbid one, aren’t you?’ she asked. He shrugged, not denying it. Leonard worked in the morgue, a job most people found unpleasant, but one that he found fit him fairly nicely. He had tried being a nurse like Marissa, but found that his bedside manner was lacking despite his technical expertise. Working with the dead was a perfect compromise. Seeing he wasn’t to be deterred, Marissa exhaled a puff of smoke. ‘I suppose it’s why I like you. Alright,’ she said.
Marissa was a petite girl of Southeast Asian descent. When not in her nursing scrubs, she let her waist-length black hair fall down her back in a cascade. Her dark skin, modest and secret smiles and small frame had been irresistible to Leonard when they had first met, and it hadn’t been long before they were taking smoke breaks together in the parking lot. He quickly found that they shared a love for horror movies and ghost stories. Leonard had promised himself he would ask her out. Any day now.
Marissa smiled mischievously. ‘You Westerners like vampires right?’ she asked. ‘We have a lot of different vampires in Southeast Asia, and none of them are sexy and suave either,’ she said with a teasing look. ‘At least, not for long.’
Leonard gave a good-natured grin. ‘I like the scary ones better anyway. So what are your vampires like? Do they wear capes? Do they live in old castles?’
‘Nothing so obvious,’ said Marissa. She stared off, as if recounting from memory. ‘In the Philipines you have the Aswang and the Manananggal, in Singapore, they fear the Pontianak and the Langsuir. None of those compares to the queen of them all,’ she said, with mock theatricality. ‘In Malaysia, our vampires are called Penanggalan. Those are the worst of them all.’
‘You lost me about five unpronounceable words back,’ said Leonard, taking another drag. Marissa gave a chuckle.
‘Penang-Galan’ she said, stretching out the word. ‘It means to detach, or to separate. Because, you see, the vampire looks like a normal person during the day, when it blends in with the rest of the village. But when the sun goes down, its head detaches, dragging all of its internal organs as it flies out, looking for blood.’
‘Wow,’ said Leonard, unable to keep the look of incredulity off his face. ‘That’s insane.’
Marissa giggled. ‘Is it any crazier than pale boys in leather seducing maidens in the night?’ she asked. Leonard nodded.
‘There’s different versions of the legend,’ continued Marissa. ‘You have to understand, these are folk tales passed down orally through the generations. In some versions, the Penanggalan can only be a woman, in others, she’s a demon born from a maiden who was interrupted mid-prayer, or a midwife who made a pact with the Devil. The details that remain the same though, are the flying head, the dangling intestines and the taste for blood.’
‘People believe these things exist right?’ asked Leonard. He was suddenly afraid of saying the wrong thing, in case he was being insensitive.
‘Some people do, some don’t,’ shrugged Marissa. ‘Most say it’s just old wives tales, or an excuse to drive away witches and spiritual healers. Still, you can find plenty of people who get extra scared at night when a baby has just been born,’ she said, with a smile. ‘They say that the vampire’s favorite type of blood is that of children.’
‘Do you believe in that sort of thing?’ asked Leonard, choosing his words carefully.
Marissa gave him a playful shove. ‘Ayah, Leonard,’ she said. ‘Of course I don’t. Do you believe in Dracula? Or the Boogeyman? These are just ghost stories for bored housewives and children.’
Leonard laughed along with her, finishing his cigarette and stubbing it out on the concrete. ‘You guys definitely have a….unique imagination,’ he said. He felt bad because it seemed crazy to him. The idea of a floating, bloodsucking head wasn’t scary, just stupid. Marissa could see the look on his face and burst out laughing.
‘It’s ok,’ she said, with a warm smile. ‘I can see you think it’s ridiculous. That’s what I thought when my Grandma first told me the story. Can you imagine what it would look like?’ she shook her head. ‘If you ask me, too much of Malaysia is still caught up in superstitions. It’s one of the reasons I left. They need to catch up with the rest of the world in the Twenty-First century.’
Leonard smiled awkwardly again as Marissa’s watch beeped, indicating her break was over. She got up and smiled again at him, banishing all thoughts of floating heads from Leonard’s mind and filling his stomach with butterflies. ‘We should go out sometime after work,’ said Marissa with a mischievous twinkle in her eye as she took one last drag and gathered her things. ‘Maybe get your mind off such morbid things.’
‘Definitely,’ stammered Leonard as Marissa breezed past him, giving him a final wave as she vanished into the stairwell, leaving him in the darkened parking lot. The sun had finally sunk behind the horizon, giving way to the cool night and the chirps of crickets. Leonard stared for a few moments out at the darkening sky and replayed the last few minutes in his head, unable to believe his luck.
---
It was midnight by the time Leonard was finally finished with his work. Most of the other hospital staff had been replaced by night-shift workers, who patrolled the wards and looked after the patients. Marissa was working late tonight, and as he finished packing up his things, he wondered if it would be weird to pop by the nurse’s lounge and say goodbye. In the morgue, he was surrounded by cold corpses packaged away in sterile, silver cabinets, neatly catalogued and organized. Most days, Leonard wasn’t a squeamish man, he couldn’t afford to be in his line of work, but tonight, there was something about the quiet, dimly lit and mostly empty hospital that gave him the creeps. He shook his head. All this talk of ghosts and vampires must have unnerved him more than he thought.
The morgue was in the basement, and Leonard walked through the fluorescent-lit hallways and up the empty staircase to the first floor. There were no cleaners around, and the nurses must have been occupied with their duties on other floors because Leonard encountered no one on his way up. A mischievous idea had entered his head as he passed by the darkened rows of beds containing sleeping patients on the ward. Marissa had often snuck up on him in the morgue during the night shift, and Leonard thought it might be time to finally return the favor. It might even be romantic or something, he thought to himself as he rounded the corner to the nurse’s lounge.
Marissa was standing at the counter, her back to Leonard as he reached the door, making herself a cup of coffee. The lounge was a large, empty room, with a wall-length window. It was lit by harsh, fluorescent lights, making sneaking up on her a difficult prospect. Leonard was about to abandon the idea when Marissa checked her watch and abruptly left her still-steaming cup of coffee, making her way to the exit at the far end of the lounge and vanishing up the stairwell. Leonard propped his bag down on a couch and followed her, the smile not leaving his face. It seemed like tonight he was having a streak of good luck.
Shadowing her, Leonard followed Marissa up three flights of stairs, before she finally exited on the maternity ward. This had confused Leonard, Marissa having no duties up there as far as he knew. The ward had several criss-crossing corridors, surrounding a large room rimmed on all sides with glass windows, where the newborn babies slept in separate cots. Leonard had never come up here before, not being a kid person himself, and paused as he followed Marissa, looking through the glass at the slumbering babies in the darkness.
A door closing at the end of the hall caught Leonard’s attention, and he followed, reaching a supply room. None of the lights were on in the ward, and Leonard had still encountered no night staff. Maybe Marissa had been covering someone else’s shift, he reasoned as he pushed the door open quietly. The room was dark, illuminated only by an open window, and in the corner, facing the wall, Leonard could just make out the familiar form of a petite girl in nursing scrubs, standing in a patch of moonlight.
The hairs on the back of Leonard’s neck stood on end as he stared. Marissa was facing the wall, not doing anything. She stood, still as one of the corpses that Leonard was used to seeing, and in a strange way, his brain couldn’t help but think of her as a corpse propped upright. He had been about to call her name, to reach out, when suddenly, her body jerked unnaturally as her head tilted upward and her neck muscles stretched like coiled snakes beneath her skin.
Leonard could do nothing but watch, bereft of speech and breath, as Marissa’s neck stretched, longer than any person’s, the skin tearing like plastic to reveal a grotesque blossom of naked muscle. A foul stench filled the room, sickly sweet, like rotting vinegar, that burned Leonard’s nostrils and made his eyes water. He stared, paralyzed, as he watched Marissa’s head, followed by a mass of bone and gore pull itself free from her body, hair dangling weightlessly around her face like a veil. Leonard watched her lungs swell out of her neck-stump like two crimson balloons, followed by dangling coils of glistening intestine that unravelled as they were pulled forth from the husk. Marissa’s headless body, cold, grey and now resembling a long-dead, though perfectly preserved corpse, twitched as it disgorged its contents into the air, before standing still.
The ghastly apparition did not waste time, floating languidly toward the ceiling tiles and slipping between them with no apparent resistance. The head and intestines folded themselves into gaps, vanishing like a worm burrowing into the earth. Leonard managed to pull himself into the room. The stench had grown worse, decay and musty rot mingling with the reek of sewage and the sickly-sweet smell of putrefying fruit. He could hardly breathe as he staggered over, not daring to make a sound, grabbing Marissa’s headless body. It felt cold and hollow, and though his eyes burned, he forced himself to look at the wound. His blood froze as he saw only darkness, as if Marissa had been hollowed out like a pumpkin.
Leonard pushed the body away from him, letting it slump against the wall, his revulsion growing as he looked at his hands and saw them wet with blood. It was brown and filled with rot and bits of flesh that clung to his skin. He backed slowly toward the door to the supply room, hardly believing what he was seeing. It had to be some kind of hallucination, his medical mind rationalized desperately. Maybe born of stress and listening to Marissa’s insane Malaysian folktales. He was probably dreaming, he thought, as he backed away from the body, out into the hallways of the maternity ward.
He was disabused of the notion when he turned around and saw the creature hanging, like a glistening sculpture of gore, in the air above the cots of the sleeping children. Leonard crouched, hiding beneath the large window as he watched the ghoulish figure, organs dangling from a ruptured neck-stump like a nightmarish jellyfish. The hair floated around the head, but in the darkness, Leonard could see Marissa’s face, eyes wide and milky white, skin pale and bloodless, mouth a gaping hole rimmed with rows and rows of fangs. As he watched, he saw tongues emerging from between those fangs, uncoiling like fat, red worms as they descended upon the sleeping babes. Like leeches, those feelers found the necks of the newborns and greedily swelled with fresh blood as the babies moaned and weakly struggled with discomfort.
Leonard’s mind was racing, and insanely, he remembered a line from Dracula. ‘Die Totden Reiten Schnell, the dead travel fast.’ Dracula had come to England, a land that had never heard of vampires to seek prey. It made sense, was inevitable, thought Leonard’s panicked mind, that vampires from other lands would seek new, unsuspecting feeding grounds as well. He couldn’t look away as the grotesque apparition fed, its organs swelling scarlet. As he watched, he almost swore he could see children’s faces and hands, thousands of them, struggling and pressing against the walls of the distended stomach.
His legs finally found strength as Leonard took off, racing for the stairwell and crashing down the flights of stairs. On his way, he reached for and pulled the fire alarm, filling the hospital with the sudden cacophony of whining noise. He dared not look behind him as he went, the stench of blood, rot and sewage following him throughout his flight, even as he ran back through the nurse’s lounge, past several surprised orderlies. He crashed through the doors of the hospital, lying on the tarmac, panting and crying, as the panicked nurses and orderlies crowded around him, trying to help him. Before he finally passed out, he thought he saw Marissa’s face staring down at him from a window, high above.
---
Leonard had been committed to a psyche-ward shortly after the incident. Firefighters had arrived to find him, unconscious outside the entrance of Opus Hospital, The night staff had been questioned extensively, and none of them had seen anything untoward beyond Leonard’s crazed behavior.
Leonard sat in his white, sterile room, so very much like the morgue he was used to with the exception of an open window that allowed sunlight in. he had been in the psyche-ward, under the care of professionals for three days now, recounting his story of vampires and floating heads uselessly to anyone who would listen. The consensus among the staff seemed to be that Leonard had suffered a total nervous breakdown, perhaps brought on by the stress of the job or the admittedly gruesome work of dealing with dead bodies all day and night. His co-workers had confirmed that he was a morbid sort of fellow, and it seemed the best for everyone concerned that he took some sick leave until he was feeling more together. Leonard sat by the window, staring out at the late afternoon sun that lit up the trees. He turned as he heard his door open.
Dr. Marston walked in with the usual array of anti-anxiety medication. ‘Leonard,’ he began with a warm smile. ‘You seem to be doing better. Are you sleeping well?’
Leonard shook his head. Dr. Marston gave him a pat on the shoulder. ‘We’ll have you out of here in no time,’ he said. ‘These are small steps on the journey toward rebuilding yourself.’
Leonard nodded as he wordlessly downed the pills. He relished the feeling of chemical relaxation, the only thing that allowed him even a small respite from the memories. He had given up talking to people who wouldn’t listen, part of his brain desperately wanting to believe it had all just been a fevered dream.
Dr. Marston smiled as he watched Leonard take the pills, before he got up. ‘Keep pushing forward, Leonard,’ he said, gently. He headed for the door, opening it, and then stopping, as if remembering something. ‘Oh right, and by the way,’ he said. ‘A new nurse has just been assigned to your wing, Marissa. I think you and her will get along just fine.’
