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The rain, the smell of rain in the morning when we woke and the air perfumed with coffee it was just like Olympia, any one of those winter days that started so slow after a night of downtown and dancing, a langorous walk to the bus wet wool socks and breakfast at Darby's. The smell in some back alley of cooking paregoric. You cannot escape it. Eyes like gravestones and the new bags underneath, they know each other and they seek each other and they find what they are looking for.

I had seen her before, at the hospital. I remembered the grey face dust like a million years of age and in my assessment when I asked her the birthdate the shock when she was five years younger than me. Grey. All the way through, to the core. Back pain and I am allergic to medicines you have not even heard of yet. Boyfriend standing there silent and gruesome and I am almost afraid of him, the way she shudders at his eyebrows, the way those eyebrows move closer toward each other with each question that I ask. And push up the sleeve to read her blood pressure and there they are, gaping mouths little gravestones like pockmarks all the way up to the elbow. Fresh gravestones gaping mouths that are absolutely hungry, starving. She is staring at the floor and I am staring at the velcro of the cuff but we both know. This moment passed between us. I know why she's here and she knows that I know. She is praying that I won't say anything. You can feel it, the sentient supplication. Just let me get what I need to get through, just let me let me.

Three in the morning an apartment we had a hard time finding and not many of us showed up. Least of all anyone comfortable with EMS. So two of us go, I am one of them, up the dimly lit creaking and steep outside staircase. The room has one lamp on the floor just a naked bulb, no shade and there is a mattress against the wall it has no sheets or coverings on it. Two or three others scattered about the room who are of absolutely no help, this time I am on her turf, summoned by someone with a guilty conscience who has long since left the dismal scene. A fresh gravestone like a garnet just below the bend in her arm and her works spread out on the floor next to her. I cannot tell if she's breathing. We take the Reeves to her and this is the hard part, to work in a profession like this and everyone so bitter and jaded against the weak. Don't want to have to endure the condescending comments from the one I'm in there with, can we just get her and get out. There is precisely no room in this world for guppies. You will absolutely be led to slaughter, by everyone. Even by people who have absolutely nothing to gain from the disinterest, and everything to lose. The ones who swear to uphold something more and sit around the table mouths full with their story telling and your life is stock and trade.

I crushed her works under my feet on my approach and ear hovering over the mouth I watched for chest rise and I prayed I would see something. Little snores though they were, respiration is respiration and thank God the other one up there could push the drug and in a few seconds she was gasping sucking for air, breath, life. Onto the Reeves backwards through the apartment to the snores of her closest friends down the creaking stairway and a lecture from the medic and we load her into the squad make the sign of the cross and it's back to the truck and home because it's three o'clock in the morning. Crawl back into bed with the nascent curiosity, is this the right line of work for me. Don't yet have those callouses. I fade into sleep clutching my crucifix and saying a prayer that I don't really want to talk about. Maybe it's the right line of work because I'm not calloused over. And how thin and frail that line really is.