“H240 Miss Emily Williams, your are not okay. You have a liver problem. If it is any consolation you were to find yourself in this place one way or another. I am better company than the hospital employed diagnosticians. I take better care of my patients.” These were a few of the first words he had spoken to her. He was formal, regularly unapproachable. Nothing but strait lines and chemically disinfected black and white attire. He couldn’t have been older than thirty, maybe a year or two younger. There was an obsession in his voice, a bridled and restrained testimony to his less than pleasant personality.

Miss Emily Williams lay flat on her back, her spine against the hard cold metal table, her pale bruised face serenely set in a hard expression. She appeared almost as though she were a soldier in perfect formation. Her warm brown eyes were hidden behind darkened lids, her emotions lost to a mask of placidity.

Ethan Kirstien threw himself down into the metal chair beside her, his white lab coat almost sweeping the scrubbed cement floor. His acutely focused attention was devoted to scanning over every word of her file, during which the room went dead silent, vacant of all sound except the electrical hum of the artificial illumination overhead. The lights drenched the cool metal, and the even colder doctor in bleached, imitative, brightness; that paled the skin and turned it surroundings into portraits of black and white.

“Why don’t you talk about yourself H240 Ms. Emily Williams. Tell me about your life, your feelings, your dreams. Tell me about your walks and your prayers, I would like to know.”

Emily Williams did not move, her voice a prisoner in her throat. No one had ever asked her questions so personal. No one had ever cared enough to address her as any more than a stranger they hardly knew. No one had tried to acquaint themselves with the lonely girl. Her arms lay by her side as though she was to remain still for a CT scan. She didn’t answer.

“There is no reason to be shy, it’s not my job to judge you.” He didn’t look at her as he spoke in that factually honed voice, thumbing through her file, reading through dates and information with calculating direction. He waited for a few moments, waited and then finally spoke again.

“You were an orphan, at St. Marion’s. Moved from house to house, a stray dog without a home. No one seemed to want you around for more than a few months. Even when you tried so hard to be perfect, especially when you tried to be perfect. Perhaps they could tell you weren’t sincere.” He paused running his tongue along the roof of his mouth as he turned the page in the silence, then looked up to her a small, almost sympathetic smile on his face. “I actually find you vaguely pretty.”

She would have choked at that. Never once had she glanced in the mirror and seen anything more than a lonely unwanted girl starring back at her, with a mop of russet hair and a splash of freckles across her round face. She had known she was ugly then, she didn’t know if she was ugly now. She couldn’t see her face.

“You were alone, and aching not to be.” He continued not waiting for a reaction. “You were looking for something. A home, a place where you could live without feeling like an outcast. You searched in school, but you only found ranks and social statuses. So you moved to London jumping from job to job, living in an apartment which you could barely afford. You wouldn’t go to church on Sundays. Yet you carried a rosary. You ate an apple in the morning and dry cereal for dinner.”

He closed the file with a hard snap that cracked and echoed about them. He stood up from the metal chair to stand at her side, his expression severe, his manner infinitely moderated. “You liked to walk, in the nighttime when most of your world was asleep. You used to sing when you thought no one was listening.” He leaned on the edge of the table, looking into her face with his elliptic eyes, so cold to everyone and everything. The lights set into the ceiling above cast shadows over his face, his countenance a relief of lights and dark. His short ebony hair falling rather untidily into his vision as starred down at her, the only aspect of him that was not rigid and motionless. “You were so alone. Just like me.”

She remained still, here eyes closed against the light from above, the surgical marks across her body stretching from her throat downwards. Her face wasn’t full anymore it had been beaten in too many times for that. Her freckles almost black against the pale blue tint of her skin. She never knew how many bones she had broken, or how many minutes had passed between her leaving her house that night and never returning.

“But you don’t have to search anymore.”

He pulled the sheet that was folded over her shoulders up and across her tranquil face blocking out the saturated cold light, muffling its indifference. With a careful motion he slid the table from its locked position into the black mouth of steel prison prepared for her. Like a one man funeral procession it was the only remembrance she was ever to receive. The light of the room beyond shrank to a pale square window at her feet until the metal door shut out the world, dousing her in blackness.

“Your home now.”