‘Take My Hand: Off to Never-Never Land’ by Mel Anastasiou

Jamie Stewart was a creature of the night, by choice and by necessity. Because she always took night-shift work, she would have been popular with the daytime orderlies if they’d ever laid their well-rested eyes on her. Jamie avoided the day shift of her own free will. She wouldn’t have taken it if she were asked. 

It was Jamie’s opinion that the phrase you can run but you can’t hide was untrue, or at least that it ought to be amended to you can’t hide for long. In the short term, these dim corridors, darkened patient rooms, and unoccupied waiting areas remained places of safety for her as much as for the patients. For one thing, the hospital was badly lit, and, like vampires and nocturnal rodents, she didn’t consider shadows to be eerie. Darkness protected her from discovery. 

Some nights a patient woke up and cried out. It was Jamie’s job and her privilege to make them comfortable and help them back to sleep if she could. To this end she talked to wakeful patients about what awaited them when they returned to the world outside, which was to say she made up stories out of her imagination because she had so little experience of the world, especially in the sunlit hours. 

Tonight, she set her bucket and mop aside in order to spend fifteen minutes with a woman undergoing much testing. Maria pronounced herself aghast that Jamie had never played cribbage. She pulled her crib board, matchsticks, and playing cards out of her alligator handbag. Two losing games later, Jamie left her to mop the central corridor. 

She said, “Thanks for teaching me how to play.”

Maria called after her, “But I didn’t teach you how to win,” and dealt herself solitaire.