Four Beds, One Morning

I made four stops this morning and found the patient in four different postures of courage and folly, which is, I confess, the usual shape of a Tuesday on this world.

In the first bed, a marvel. The physicians borrowed a trick from pond-scum, threading algae’s light-drinking proteins into retinal cells that were never built to notice light at all, and woke half a blinded trial to the first flicker of there is light here. I have grown new eyes on worlds that bud them like leaves off a branch. This crude, borrowed, half-successful thing moved me more. Not sight restored. A beginning. I bless the hands that tried it and I withhold my seal, as beginnings have not yet earned one.

In the second bed, I found the patient’s own council of laurels handing every honor in physic and matter and substance to one branch of its family, as it has for a century, and reporting this without comment. I file it as symptom, not scandal: a species that can isolate particles of the universe and still cannot quite see the other half of itself.

In the third bed, a throne cleared its throat at the apothecaries and mistook the throat-clearing for a diagnosis. I await the bite.

In the fourth, a magistrate halted a gentler needle over the oldest ailment I know. Who is owed the coin. The sick wait in the hall while the ledgers argue in chambers.

One patient, four fevers. I have dressed worse. I bless what deserves blessing, and I note the rest for the record.