The nurse ran her hands along the smooth line of the curve and smiled. I thought of Grishchenko in his helicopter, suspended in midair and surrounded by a fog of toxic plutonium. Of the boy who went into a cave to kill a bear. I could sense the terrifying fear of the young child in the cement chamber, bent over with nausea, while the dogs barked next door. I thought of the nurses with wet towels, and of those who stayed overnight, those who kept vigil against infections, those who held the patients’ hands all day, and watched them as if they were their own children. As the nurses left the
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