And, leaving, her attention was drawn to a grasshopper, which it appeared someone had painted. Perhaps some small child. The grasshopper toiled in the road, struggling, dragging its cruelly besilvered limbs across the pavement.
The nurse stopped for a moment, those silver limbs flashing in her eyes like realizations.
Should she come to the assistance of another poor creature on this planet, unto whom no good had been done? The nurse debated.
She had an itch on her ass cheek, but she neglected this as a consideration in favor of that which for her was the Trump Card of Her Days.
Ronald had left her not two weeks before. And what had he told her -- terrible Ronald -- as he posed for her memory in the frame of her door? He had said, I've given what love I can give. I know my love is gleaming, baby, and I don't want to smother you.
And now the nurse realized: that painted grasshopper in the street: it was she! She'd been given a chance somehow to save herself via this mechanism. But what, oh what, would she do?
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