Better Times by Batkie Sara;

Author:Batkie, Sara; [Batkie, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC029000 Fiction / Short Stories (single Author)
ISBN: 5448583
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2018-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

North Country, Early Morning

They pull up to the hospital in a red car, can’t tell the make or year. There’s something familiar in them, even after they step out. I’m behind the check-in desk as usual and can see them from the window. They’re moving slowly as they make their way across the lot, trench coats flapping in the breeze, clothes underneath dark as a starless sky, so I know it’s not an emergency even before I notice the masks. Rubber, I guess; one dark-haired, one gray, but the same jowly faces and twisty grinning mouths. Like the kind you’d see around a cigar.

I seem to understand what they want before they even come in, already turning toward the cabinet and bending over to undo the lock. When I open its doors there’s nothing inside. It’s empty: just rows blank as children’s stares where bottles of pills and syrups should be. And now one of ’em’s jumping over the vestibule to stick his gun in my face, the black bag held out for something I can’t give him.

“What the fuck is this?” he says, and it takes me a second to realize he’s talking to me. That’s when I know they’re not from around here. Along with their car, their clothes, and the fact that they’re robbing us.

As he forces me up, my hands behind my head, elbows sticking out like chicken wings, toward the stock room, he knows the one, he says, I repeat to myself: my name is Grace, my name is Grace, my name is Grace.

My husband, Jerry, talked about grace a lot. Both as a state and an option. “Choose grace,” he said. “Be the grace you seek in others.” I like this because it sounds easy but is actually something you have to remind yourself to do every minute of every day. Most people walk around the world and connect with it the same way they breathe. That’s why it’s so hard to change; nobody bothers to think about it.

Sometimes when Jerry called I didn’t remember him right away, not until he spoke. He had a bed-making voice. No matter what words he said, his voice smoothed them over like a sheet on a mattress. By the end he’d get something neat and fine out of what originally seemed like a chore. “Choose to be God’s grace in this world,” he would tell me, “and you will be loved in the next.” I wrote that down on a sheet of paper so I wouldn’t forget it.

There are six of us on duty between 11:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m., but only five of us are in the stockroom. The dark-haired guy brings us in one by one while the other stands guard. He holds the barrel of his shotgun pointed down between his legs, as if there’s any doubt what he thinks of it, scratching at his chin like he expects a beard to be there. We’re all sitting on the ground in a semicircle. Alice and Marie look scared, Kiki looks bored, Ari’s wet himself.

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