Historical fiction
Unloved, she was - the only binds to her family a last name and college tuition. Hung and painted like an ornament, she was to dangle from a windowsill to evoke a sense of envy in others, the token of well-establishment to her parents. Amid all this jealousy for her fragile beauty, she was never loved other than the surface-level praise for the image she paints. “A good Christian,” they would say, despite her warring with her faith beneath her skin, beneath the motions of prayers she did every day. She was decorative although unseen, representative for unattainability and inhuman expectations.
An only child, she was, with no one to commiserate. Her frizzy blonde locks were constantly dampened to stay confined into ringlet curls, and her freckles were slathered with powder and crème concealer constantly. She had no hope of running away, all her relatives were deceased, so she ran away with her imagination, escaping reality into books. Her mother was an actress, her dad a wealthy business man, so she had a lot of pressure on her to appear a certain way.
After 17 grueling years, she reached into her cherry-red mailbox and opened her acceptance letter to nursing school with deliberate, animated movements.
The U.S joined the war, and she took her first steps into becoming a WW1 nurse.
The air was palpable, yet carrying the stillness of death – the only reverberations through the thin walls were the eccentric tones of the monitors. Amid her trembling hands and bis-in-die panic attacks, she had her first taste of love. Sweeter than the sugar pills of affection she was fed, it was like a ray of sunshine in a blizzard. Feeding her patients sidewalk-flavored “cherry” cough syrup may have been the first time she truly felt cared for although she was the caretaker.
Her patients slipped her chocolate squares and Lucky Strike cigarettes during her breaktime, which she was immensely grateful for. Sometimes she would get newspapers, big, black, eye-catching letters against the off-white paper printing “Germany signed the treaty! The war is over!” Despite the repetition of seeing these words, she still felt a deep sense of security knowing her patients would not suffer any more. She did not learn about the war through press censorship and posters of honor and glory, but through the closest visual of Hell she could get on earth. Amputees, blindness, the conditions that stripped away not only dignity but life itself, fell into her care. She grasped the newspaper tighter, reading quietly to herself…
“France has imposed harsh reparations on Germany, severe military restrictions, and territorial losses.” She smiled to herself, feeling not patriotism for her country, but a sense of vengeance for the people she lost.
They always had these immaculate stories to tell about the world war, her patients, poison gas and landmines as well as the scars to show it. One of her patients, a gunshot wound survivor, she would talk to a lot. He was a chubby, short one, the type to get drunk at weddings and make you laugh until your head spun. Most people thought he was manic, alcohol-dependent, and disease-ridden. Despite his unadulterated joy and commercial-like joyous expression, she noticed he got silent when he was alone. Sweat beads formed on his forehead when he went to sleep; trembling in his haze of nightmares that felt so real to him, so real that reality was subservient. “Shell-shocked”: a word that means so much more than its face value. It’s almost like he was disconnected from the world, even though the war was over he would flinch when someone dropped a pan of surgical instruments.
She would step outside to smoke with the veterans she was taking care of. “So, tell me about yourself”, they would ask. She could not find the words to say, perhaps it was the lack of who she was that kept the words in her mouth, perhaps it was her dry and ashy throat. She stood there awkwardly, basking in the thrill of the “rebellious” nature of smoking while she took a drag from her cigarette, exhaling as if the smoke would blow into word-shaped patterns in the air to convey what she felt.
Who was there to tell her to smile wider, stand up straighter? Lost and dizzy in the unbridling of her self-expression, “her” became “me”. Hideous, unacceptable imperfections softened into “quirks”, accentuating her my identity rather than tainting the idea of me.
However, it seemed like I only had a moment to answer the question before the death of my patients. It felt like I had to hear “Time of death:” announced for every possible combination of minute and hour. But it hit hard, more than a curse under my breath, more than a statistic of losses on a chart. There is no way I can convey this magnitude of pain with my words in a way that you can empathize with – it is the type of heartbreak you need to feel firsthand to be able to visualize. Well, I felt this every day. When I was only 17, a year before the war ended.
The only positive I learned is that a dying patient won’t notice the color of your lipstick (except for the ones real desperate for a lady), won’t care for your sloppy notes or human errors. They were too encapsulated in the overwhelm of feelings in the transience between life and death.
The stock market exploded. She found herself surrounded by constant trends undulating back and forth different fabrics; the world around her swaying in a raging tempest of perfume scents and pearl necklaces as she tried to find inner stability. Cherry-red lips and shimmery blue eyes, a myriad of ways to express yourself, she was surprised by the freedom and versatility of clothes.
The great depression hit, people diverging from a bustling metropolis into a silent, abandoned town. People going from polka-dot flapper dresses to stained potato sacks that were now “in style.” . I had physical assets to keep me afloat in the midst of the flood. I scattered the trinkets that my dead patients gave me, silently calculating how many pennies I would be able to trade in for. A silver locket, a bar of chocolate, a box of used cigarettes. $2.78.
