July 31, 2026 [Issue 48] Untitled Flash, Justin Hollis

The emergency room was so understaffed the least laid-up of us was called on to pitch in.  Despite a sprained wrist, I found myself pushing the wheelchair of a wonderfully free-spirited elderly woman.  Soon we were whizzing up and down the halls, whooping like schoolchildren.  Somehow we found ourselves in an obscure corridor in the recesses of the hospital.  Here was only one small room.  In one of the beds, a walrus was hooked up to a heart monitor.  A bouquet of sunflowers bowed depressingly in a fishbowl and a deflating Get Well balloon drooped from the ceiling.  I helped the old woman into the other bed, and she thanked me graciously.  She couldn’t remember when she had felt as young as she had rushing through the hospital, she said, patting what I now noticed was her obviously pregnant belly!  “Don’t look so surprised, you look a bit pregnant yourself,” she said, indicating the growing bulge under my shirt.  Now this was something, I thought, tipping back under the suddenly giant weight into the wheelchair.  If only I could be as confident and assured as the old woman, who appeared completely nonplused at the prospect of what was sure to be a difficult labor.