Who Juliennes Carrots at Midnight

Bleach, and something under the bleach. Everyone who has spent a night here knows the second smell and nobody can name it.

I'm here because my chest feels like there's weight on it. Probably nothing. Definitely something. That's the whole condition.

She's across the aisle with a dish towel around her left hand, gone through in one spot, the dark circle widening at a rate of about an hour.

"Cooking accident," she says, catching me looking. "I was julienning carrots. At midnight. Who juliennes carrots at midnight."

"Someone who isn't sleeping."

"Right."

Boeuf bourguignon, she says. The Montreal version, maple instead of sugar, which she admits is not a version, it's just what she had in the cupboard.

Triage calls B47. Then A23. Then C91. There is no logic to it that anyone in this room has managed to work out, and everyone in this room has tried.

I tell her the chest thing started in a faculty meeting about posthumanism. She laughs hard enough that the towel slips and she has to redo the whole wrap.

Dawn comes up in the window over the vending machines. That flat grey that isn't light yet.

Her number comes. She stands, gets her coat over the bad arm, and says: "Emergency rooms are good for one thing. They tell you what an emergency is."

Mine was nothing. Muscular. They told me to stretch.

I still cook at bad hours. I own a mandoline now. I use the guard.