The doctors, the nurses, the janitors and candy-stripers - they crowded around his hospital bed, their shoulders rubbing up against each other, and shaved away his skin and sewed pins through his neck, and they broke his bones into forty pieces and split his face with paperweights. They wrapped the boy in clean sheets and flowers and dropped him at the side of the road in the rain, and he washed away through the pavement and dribbled through the drains and into the ocean. ‘Good luck,’ they said. ‘Good night.’
