Page 4 of Hospital for Immortal Creatures

“You’re too late. They’re already dead,” Amelia said, staring deep into the bird’s eyes.

It lowered its head, as if it understood. As if it cared. As if it was offering condolences.

Amelia hated condolences. Instead of comforting her, they served as a reminder of what she had lost.

“Be gone, you horrid black creature!” She yelled at the crow, but it didn’t budge from its position in the tree. “Fuck you, then. Sit there and watch.” She walked past it and rushed home.

The low branches of the trees on both sides of the path intertwined above her head, drizzling wilted leaves with every blow of the wind. It must have been cold, but warmth crept up her cheeks as she exited the timber tunnel and headed to the wider part of South Park. The sight of a couple in matching sweatsuits jogging past her awakened her gag reflex. So cheesy. Ugh.

She gave herself a second to shake off the image and focused on the day ahead. Tomorrow night, she was scheduled to be on duty at the surgical wing of the St. Nicolas Hospital. Working there as a nurse was dirty and exhausting, made even more so by one of the surgeons’ wandering hands every time he caught her alone in the staff room. But the money was worth it, and the surgeon had long passed the age of being capable of raising anything but his arms, so he was harmless. Overall, though, she enjoyed working at the hospital. Her dream of becoming a doctor hadn’t changed since childhood, one of the few things that life hadn’t dissuaded her from. Amelia was so close to the finish line; one final exam and she would become a doctor. But until then, she had to work as a nurse to support herself. So little left to do, but she’d get there.

She passed by a handsome middle-aged man in sportswear, who was sliding his finger up and down the screen on his phone. When he noticed her, he started tossing his hands back and forth, as if warming up for his exercise. He smiled and greeted her with a husky “Hello.”

Amelia glanced at him with indifference – slicked-back hair, playful eyes, cocky smile, and a direct approach. He might as well have been called Mr. Comes-in-your-mouth-without-warning. No, thank you.

A grin tugged at her lips at the nickname. She hadn’t heard it since eighth grade, when one of her friends had come across the phrase on TV and had liked it so much, she’d used it all the time to address the horny teenagers in their class that had probably never even gotten a blowjob in their lives.

She walked by and forgot all about him as she waited at the stoplight to cross the busy morning traffic boulevard. The dump she was inhabiting was just across from the park – the only positive side to that so-called four hundred square feet apartment. It suited her well. She never had friends over, except for that colleague from the university who had spent a couple of awkward nights with her.

Once home, she had a quick shower, dressed in a pair of jeans and a shirt, and made a half-hearted attempt at fixing her hair. Before her parents’ death, she’d had beautiful, light blonde locks that fell to her waist. Now, she wore it shoulder-length and always straight or tied in a simple ponytail. A ponytail day awaited ahead.

Taking one last glance at her pale reflection in the mirror, she struggled to recognise the person staring back at her with the haggard, foreign face. The single familiar feature was her dark blue eyes. Sure, they’d lost their spark, but still… Mom’s sapphires.

Except Mom was gone now, and so was the shine of her sapphires.

Amelia threw on a long coat, hid herself behind enormous sunglasses, and walked out straight in the middle of the monotonous grey routine of her everyday life.

The usual crowd of elderly men and women mourning the death of communism had already taken their seats on the benches in front of the building. A golden retriever was satisfying his morning needs on the neglected lawn nearby as his owner yelled into her phone. The dog produced a massive pile, which the woman ignored as she started tugging him away, to which the pensioners reacted with angry shouts and threatening cane-waving.

Amelia’s bag vibrated. She located the Nokia she’d been using ever since she had deleted all her social media profiles and had decided that she didn’t need the useless functions of the modern-day phone. The caller ID read “Work”.

“Dragova, are you free tonight?” Her boss was a straight-to-the-point kind of guy.

She frowned. “I believe so.”

“Half the staff has some sort of stomach flu. Nikolova is sick, Krasteva just called that she can’t work her shift, the head nurse is also out…”

That explained why the boss was calling her himself.

“All right, I’ll be there.”

“Good, I’m adding you to the schedule.” With that, he hung up.

“Hello” and “Thank you” weren’t part of his repertoire. ‘We work to get the job done, not scratch our tongues with useless bullshit,’ was his motto. Amelia was fine with that; she didn’t like to disclose personal information at work anyway, and that was very easy to do when the boss tolerated no frivolities. ‘Whoever gets his work done, gets more work, that’s why we pay you for “working hours”.’ Another motto. That was fine, too. Free time often crept up on her with unsavoury thoughts, so she liked to keep busy.

She turned left at the crossing of Louis Ayer and Silivriya Street and found her old orange Renault parked along the curb among the other cars. Stick shift and a tad too large, but not something she could part with. It had been a present from her father for her excellent performance on the entry exams at the Medical University of Sofia. She had avoided using it at first, worried about the city traffic, but her father had persuaded her as, according to him, every woman had to be an active driver.

She hit the first traffic jam a minute into driving. On rare days like today, when she wasn’t late for work or classes, idling in traffic calmed her. She had accepted that no matter what she did, the cars in front wouldn’t magically get scooped up with a vacuum cleaner and clear her path. So, free from responsibility and worry, she reached for the glove compartment and fished out her Godsmack CD. There were traffic jams where she preferred Alicia Keys, but today, she craved the sound of electric guitars.

Thirty minutes later, Amelia parked across the street from Nadine’s apartment, a fellow student, and headed up to get her notes from all of Professor Sokolev’s lectures.

Tiffany, Nadine’s dog – a Dogo Argentino purebred – greeted Amelia at the door with a curious sniff. She was deaf but recognised gestures, and with her long uncut ears and her sweet temper, she could almost pass for a Labrador.

Nadine passed the thumb drive and blurted out, “I’m leaving for Berlin right after the final exam.”

“Oh…wow.” Amelia blinked. “Will you do your residency there?”

“I hope so.”

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