The End by Salvatore Scibona

Author:Salvatore Scibona
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Years ago, Mrs. Marini had worn a nurse’s costume. It fit her poorly, so she had adjusted it. Nico said it made her look like an iceberg. To be addressed as Nurse when she had for many years allowed her clients to call her Madam Doctor was the cost of a modest advance in her method and a significant new source of referred clients. It was also a penance for a septic case she might have prevented if she had spoken more carefully.

The girl had ratted her out to a tokologist at the Lutheran hospital, who had then tracked her down at Nico’s store. Nico attended the register while they talked in the workshop. The doctor knew all about her practice, as did his colleagues, but he had never had occasion to clean up a mess of hers before, which, ironically, had led him to seek this meeting.

“I was struck dumb when she told me you were responsible,” he said. “But while I was performing the therapeutic, I recovered a foreign object. That was when I concluded she was lying to me. I suppose she was too proud to say she had tried it herself and failed.”

“What did she look like?”

The doctor gave a precise depiction, which she recognized immediately.

“She thought my fee too high,” Mrs. Marini said.

“And you turned her out?”

“Of course not. I asked her what she could afford. And that was my error, that word, afford. I engaged her shame, and she walked off. What was the object?”

“A pencil tip.”

She made a little smile.

“It appears your record is better than mine, which I find difficult to believe, but there it is. You couldn’t possibly duplicate the sterility of a professional office, for example.”

“All of you were so surprised about germs.” In the air, she drew a broad circle around the doctor’s head to include the whole of the medical profession. “One does not need a theory of invisible animals to know it is repugnant to eat with a dirty fork.”

He proposed an exchange. He was interested in what she knew. She would “assist” him in his surgery with the cases for which he was able to get hospital approval. Most often a father or husband had purchased a determination that the woman’s life was threatened. Mrs. Marini learned a little about a topical anesthetic treatment and a slower, less painful means of cervical dilation.

When they parted ways, he gave her an assembly of elegant steel tools.

“I already own all these,” she said.

“Anyway, they’re spares. Curette derives from the Latin for ‘to take care of.’”

“I know,” she said, exasperated, and shook his hand.

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