She Talks to Angels

This is a continuation of a story I started a few weeks ago.

As Tory grew older she eventually stopped hearing the voices, or at the very least, ignored them. But she knew they were still there. How else would she know what people were thinking sometimes before they opened their mouth, or know when to take her umbrella to work even though the sky was clear blue without a cloud?

Once she tried nursing school. She loved studying about the human body, the chemical reactions, and the biological processes. The words were like music to her ears, all Latin-based, like words a sorcerer would use when casting a spell. But when she started clinical practice in a nursing home she realized she had made a mistake. The man they assigned to her was suffering from advanced Parkinson’s and he was forever curled into a fetal position. Mr. Farmer was a black man with big dark green eyes made bigger by the taut skin stretched tight across his cheekbones. There was a picture of the former Mr. Alton Farmer who was a large smiling happy man in a shiny red Cadillac convertible. This man in front of her reminded Tory of an Egyptian mummy come to life, and bore no resemblance to the man in the Polaroid on the wall beside his bed. As she watched him, his eyes traveling over to the window and then to her. His eyes seemed to be pleading with her. What did he want?

She felt a desolation, a desperation, heart-breaking sorrow and depression like she had never felt before when she looked at him. She had seen people in a nursing home before, her grandmother had died in one. She had never felt like this before.

As she fed him, one of the nursing instructors came in. “Hey, Mr. Farmer! How’s your breakfast?”

He half-moaned and muttered something that sounded nothing like human speech.
“He said, ‘not bad,’” Tory said.
The nursing instructor stared at her in disbelief. “He did?”
“Yes, didn’t you hear him?”
The nursing instructor rolled her eyes and walked out of the room.

Later a large man in white, an orderly with the name “John” on his shirt came in to weigh him. As Tory tried to pull Mr. Farmer over on his side so they could get him into the scale harness, he cried out. She stopped what she was doing and let him go. “Oh, he hollers out like that sometimes, he don’t mean nothing by it,” John explained.

She watched as John pulled his body out of its fetal position enough to get the straps on him. Tory helped him as much as she could, trying not to use too much force on the poor man. Mr. Farmer’s eyes grew wide as he looked at Tory with that pleading look again. A feeling of nausea came over her followed by a lightheadedness.

“We’re hurting him!” she cried out suddenly.
“I’ve got to weigh him,” John snapped.

She walked out and stood in the hallway, her hands shaking as she hugged herself.
“Ms. Anderson, why aren’t you in there with your patient?”

She glared at the nursing instructor, then walked out the door to the parking lot, got in her car and left. She never went back.

A few weeks later she ran into John at the mall and asked about Mr. Farmer.
“They found out his hip was fractured. He was in pain the whole time and couldn’t tell anybody.”

Tory walked away quickly before he could see the tears in her eyes.