The Long Shift

By 3 AM, Emma felt like a zombie—twelve hours into a double shift at the hospital, her surgical mask fogging with each breath. She ran a hand through her hair, matted from sweat and the cap she'd worn since midnight.

"Vitamin D levels are critically low," Dr. Patel said, reviewing the lab results of the patient in Bed 4. "He's been supplementing, but it's not absorbing."

Emma nodded mechanically. She'd stopped taking her own vitamins months ago. Stopped doing a lot of things, really, since the divorce. Stopped caring whether her own body worked as long as she could keep other people's bodies from failing.

Later, at the sink, she scrubbed her hands for the third time that hour. The water ran hot over her skin, red and raw, and she watched it swirl down the drain thinking about how her ex-husband had always told her she worked too much. As if twelve-hour shifts saving lives was some kind of personal failing.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. David: *You coming to breakfast?*

David was the resident who'd been flirting with her for weeks—ten years younger, with optimism she found both irritating and dangerously appealing. She should say no. She should go home and sleep for eight hours and maybe remember what it felt like to be a person instead of a medical instrument.

*Yes,* she typed.

The word surprised her. In the call room, she caught her reflection in the mirror—hair escaping her ponytail, deep circles under her eyes, the dull thousand-yard stare of someone who'd seen too many people die. She looked like death. She felt like it.

But David was waiting in the cafeteria, and he smiled when he saw her, and Emma thought that maybe feeling like a zombie didn't mean you had to be dead forever.