Sticky Fingers 4 by JT Lawrence EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: JT Lawrence
- Language: English
- Genre:Horror Short Stories
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
TEARS OF A DEAD MAN
“WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE PROBLEM?” asks the doctor.
He’s young—too young—and he’s wearing an expensive scarf. Two clues
that he doesn’t really know anything. I’m not saying he didn’t go to med
school. I’m not saying the certificates on the wall are fake.
“Mister Rohandron?” he says. “What can I help you with today?”
I stare at the paisley pattern on the green silk wound around his neck. It
reminds me of a snake. I heave my eyes up to his.
“I think I’m dead,” I say.
Doctor Folly—
(Folly? Really? And he expects me to take him seriously as a man of
science? But there is his surname up on the wall, in gold, and I suppose
there is no arguing with that.)
Doctor Folly purses his lips, and his adam’s apple moves up and down. It’s
a knobbly one, and it makes me wonder how he gets such a clean shave
over that jagged rock of cartilage. Makes me wonder how he—in a hurry
for a medical conference—doesn’t slip and cut the whole thing off and
bleed to death in his luxurious en-suite bathroom.
“You think you’re dead?”
Why is he repeating after me? Does he think he misheard? Did he think I
said I think I’m deaf?
“Yes,” I say. “I think I am dead.”
His dark eyebrows link together. He’s got a deep frown for a man of such a
tender age.
“All right,” he says, tilting his head slightly. “What makes you think that?”
“Can you do the exam?” I ask. “Do the physical examination and then we’ll
talk later.”
Doctor Folly blinks at me.
“All right,” he says again.
He taps his stethoscope with a manicured finger, then places the cold disc—
a silver grey planet—on my chest. He’s still frowning.
“Breathe in,” he says, and I do.
“Breathe out.”
The air leaves my chest in a rush. My lungs still work. They still balloon
and shrink, balloon and shrink, but it’s dead air.
Dr Folly listens as I examine the creases in his forehead. There aren’t very
many; not compared to mine, anyway. My skin is a stinking shroud, a
roadmap to nowhere etched in dead leather.
He removes the planet from my chest and shrugs his stethoscope back
around his neck.
“You see?” I say, buttoning up my shirt. “Dead inside.”
“Mr Rohandron,” he says, “as far as I can tell, you’re very much alive.”
I’m incensed. I’m tired of doctors who think they know more about my
body than I do after an examination that took less than sixty seconds. “What
kind of medical exam was that?”
“You are breathing, Mr Rohandron,” says the man.
“It’s dead air,” I say. “It’s not reaching my bloodstream.”
“And your heart is beating.”
“Don’t you think I’d know if my heart was beating?”
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