The Last Shift

At 3 AM, the hospital cafeteria smelled of despair and overcooked vegetables. Maya pushed the spinach around her plate, the wilted leaves gray under fluorescent lights. Twelve hours of holding dying hands, of witnessing the moment when consciousness flickered out like a candle in a drafty room. She'd become a zombie herself somewhere around year three—moving through her shifts on autopilot, her emotional responses eroded by the constant proximity to death's industrial machinery.

The break room television flickered with news about another forest fire somewhere distant. Bears wandering into suburban neighborhoods, disoriented by smoke and loss. She thought about her ex-husband's last voice message, still sitting unheard in her phone. How he'd said she'd turned cold, that she carried grief like other people carried luggage.

"You still here?" Dr. Chen appeared in the doorway, his own eyes rimmed with exhaustion. He'd lost three patients tonight. They all had their rhythms for surviving it.

She nodded. "Someone has to bear witness."

He sat across from her, staring at his coffee. "My daughter asked me yesterday why I always look so tired. She's seven. What do I tell her? That I've seen too many bodies become objects? That the dead don't care about our sleep schedules?"

Maya finally took a bite of spinach. It tasted like obligation and nutrients, like everything in her life that was supposed to be good for her but felt like punishment. Outside, sirens wailed—a city that never stopped dying, never stopped living, relentless as hunger.

"We tell her," Maya said, swallowing the metallic taste, "that some people stay up so others can sleep. That it's honorable work." Even as she said it, she wondered if she believed it anymore. The zombie feeling deepened. Tomorrow she'd quit. Tomorrow she'd call her ex back. Tomorrow she'd feel something genuine again.

But tonight, there were more patients. More bodies bearing down on them. More spinach to finish.