Stay - A New Short Story
Available for FREE on Amazon Kindle for a limited time
In honor of Nurses Week, I wrote a love letter to one of the hardest and most human professions.
STAY is a short story about grief, quiet rebellion, and the impossible choices nurses make every day behind closed doors. You can read it for free on Amazon Kindle (both Kindle Unlimited & regular Kindle) for a limited time. You can also get a paperback copy of this 49-page or so short story for a few bucks.
Here’s an excerpt:
They told us in school that you’d never forget your first patient death.
But no one said anything about the smell.
Not rot. Not exactly. It was sweeter than that. Thicker. Like a bad memory made physical. Like syrup left too long on a hot burner—something you didn’t smell so much as taste, at the back of your throat, in your teeth, behind your eyes.
“Keep moving, baby nurse. Stand still too long, you start thinking. Then it’s all over.”
That was Ella Mae Callahan. The nurse I’d been assigned to shadow for my first clinical rotation at County General.
No one called it that, of course—not in real life. The sign out front had somebody’s name on it, probably a county commissioner or a bank donor. But inside these walls, it was just County. Everyone knew what that meant: understaffed, underfunded, and absolutely overflowing.
The walls were the same beige they’d probably been in 1983. The clocks ticked instead of gliding. The hand sanitizer dispensers wheezed like they were trying to breathe. But Ella moved through it all like she’d built it herself.
“First time on night shift?” she asked, though we both knew the answer. My scrubs still crackled when I walked. My shoes hadn’t scuffed. Even my stethoscope looked too clean, draped around my neck like an accusation.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She snorted. “Don’t call me ‘ma’am.’ I’m Ella. And you’re Jasmine—the one they warned me about.”
“They warned you?”
“You ask too many questions.”
I hesitated. “Is that… bad?”
She handed me a clipboard thick with charts. “Not always. I like questions. It’s the ones who think they know everything that’ll get you killed.”
We started walking. The corridor buzzed faintly overhead, like the lights were tired too. Room 408: a ventilator wheezed. 410: someone was crying—not sobbing, just a slow leak of grief. 412: TV on mute, blue light blinking over a motionless face.
“How many patients tonight?” I asked.
“Twelve assigned. Really more like twenty. Jeremy in 415 counts for at least eight by himself.”
“Why? What’s wrong with him?”
She paused outside a door marked with a yellow isolation cart. “End-stage pancreatic. Twenty-six. No family. No insurance.”
“Twenty-six?” I blinked. “That’s… young.”
She nodded once. “Three weeks here. First time in. Probably his last.”
I glanced at my clipboard. “But he has a discharge order—”
“Ignore it,” she said, voice going flat. “There’s always a discharge order. Doesn’t mean it’s happening.”
I opened my mouth again—too many questions building—but she pushed open the door before I could ask more.