Nights Below Station Street Read Online Free

flew out of the windshield and landed on the asphalt. There was a smell of burnt tin, and in the distance part of a broken windshield. When they found Myhrra, she was jammed between the front seat and the dash, still singing. Her mouth had been cut – so even now she had a little scar. They took her to the hospital and she was laughing hysterically. She was talking to Leroy – and he was sitting up, lighting nurses’ cigarettes, and comforting everyone else about him. And then he grabbed Myhrra and began to dance. Later that night he went into a coma – and he died. After the accident she had trouble and peed the bed. After she was married her husband used to make her wear plastic pants, and for a while he would sleep in a chair over near the door, with the blanket up over him.

    It was boredom that drove Myhrra to become a hospital volunteer this winter. She went there and visited the sick, brought them magazines and read their letters to them. The magazines themselves were two or three months old. Some of the letters had been read before. Some of the people were catheterized, and lay silently under the lights. Some would grow weaker from one visit to the next. And some would look at her suspiciously, and be angry about something.
    Dr. Hennessey did not approve of the volunteer program, which was new. He was an old man who looked ather sternly and scared her every time she went there. He’d been in the war, and yet in his manner there was such an overwhelming sense of kindness that she could not be upset with him for long.
    His hands shook, and his feet clomped about from one room to the next. He walked about the hospital cursing under his breath, with a nurse following him. People were generally frightened of him. He got into an argument with one old fellow who said he liked it when the volunteers dropped by to see him.
    “Well, you shouldn’t,” Dr. Hennessey said.
    “Why not?”
    “Just because you shouldn’t like them – you should want to be all alone rather than have them coming by.” “You don’t like them, doctor?”
    “Sure – sure they’re the very best, boy – the very best.”
    And with that, he cut off his conversation and walked down the hall, breathing heavily, smoking in the nonsmoking sections.
    “Myhrra,” he would say to her, “you should go home.”
    “What do you mean – I’m scheduled to sit with Mr. Salome.” And she would haul out a list and show him. He would take the paper, look at it at arm’s length and say:
    “Well, perhaps – but he’s asleep – and mostly dead – and perhaps it’s best if you just go home now.” Then he would smile and say: “I like your new patent leather shoes.” And clumsily she would look up at him in the dark, and clumsily he would walk away.

    Over everything in town rose the hospital, the station, the church, and the graveyard. Below, the river rested, beyondthe woods and through the centre of town. Old buildings were being slowly replaced, being torn away, their steps faded, their pane-glass windows looking glib in the winter light.
    As time went on, the doctor felt less a part of things and more by himself. Some days he would see as many as one hundred patients and find himself being rude to almost everyone. Things were changing. Now, nurses coming out of university talked about units of time, and time-units per patient. This not only bothered the old doctor, but made him sceptical of everything. He found it more and more irritating as he went on his rounds. He didn’t like the nurses or the nurses’ union, and had no love for unions in general. In a strange almost impractical way the nurses liked him a good deal, and not because he was overly kind in his comments. He went about declaring things. He declared that people should be shot if they pestered him about prescriptions for “little” ailments; and whenever a “disaster” happened with his sister-in-law Clare, he would say: “Did a disaster happen? Well, good.”
    The