Hanging out in a hospital again and you’d think there wouldn’t be anywhere for tinies to be in the locked flight risk ward of the ER but the night nurses know better.
The night nurses don’t care. Long before the state cut the funding for the fifth time in four years the night nurses and the pale tinies on the first floor decided: we’re both here, we can’t leave (nobody can), let’s do what we can.
Temporary detainment order. Magistrate. Paper gown. Please remove your shoelaces. You can hang yourself with your shoelaces. Emergency custody order proceeding. The cafeteria has that nice Filipino woman bringing in lumpia today.
Watchful boredom. The tinies hoard crayons and make sure that the children who are brought in can have them. In the morning the parents come back. I drew you daddy, I drew you mommy. The drawings are horrible and wonderful. The drawings are perfect renditions.
When a bed is finally found for the child, three hundred miles away, the nurses come in and clean. They leave the drawings for their tiny comrades. Their collection would shame the Musée de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Let’s do what we can, they say. The rule of threes, they say. One third will get better no matter what we do. One third will get worse no matter what we do. One third will not change at all. But they do what they can anyway.
Here on the locked ward of the ER they are all two inches tall: the tinies, the nurses, the visitors, the patients, the cops. We are all two inches tall on the locked ward of the ER.
Size Writes 