Ibu Susu Kesayangan Duda Tampan

I press the gauze to the palm of the little girl in front of me, faking a wince as I pretend empathy for her frailty. Memories of the copper tang of my mother’s wounds, the iridescent shimmer of the clotting gel that webbed over her open skin. The way it looked less like congealing blood and more like the iridescent streak of a rainbow in an oil slick. It makes doing my job a bit harder, the constant pretending to care about people who could care less about me. The constant memories the sight of their blood brings. It’s too much.

June is in full force, making my small clinic’s waiting room thick with heat. The waft of canned air assaults my nose as the walls glaze over with faded safety posters. My black curls are piled high on my head in a futile attempt to keep my neck dry. I’ve gotten used to the way children tend to stare with their wide and considerate eyes, though it doesn’t make it any easier.

“You have such cold hands,” the child says, not with a shudder but almost with admiration. “Are you a witch?”

I offer a smile that is only partly manufactured, a feat I only seem capable of with children. “No, I’m a nurse.”

I read once that lying to children gives them a false sense of security within the world, but I learned long ago that the truth doesn’t matter here. Not in this tiny town, where the nearest threat to a secret like mine is a nosy old woman with a penchant for gossip. Still, every word that passes my lips is weighed and measured. Every phrase is calibrated to draw no attention. If there is one thing my mother ever taught me, it’s that you can never be too careful.

Within minutes, I’ve finished bandaging the girl’s hand and sending her off with a sucker. The sucker seems to be a ritual, one the humans seem to enjoy, and I like to believe in the power of rituals. In anything really, that can keep me from thinking too much about how far from home I am.

There had been a time, not all that long ago, when the idea of exile would have been laughable. The courts of Faerie, extravagant with their otherworldly pomp, were as much a part of me as the bones in my body or the magic under my skin.

But what had started as a single, reckless gesture, a self imposed exile, has spiraled into a disaster of cosmic proportions. Yes, I had been allowed to leave with my life intact, but only with the strictest of conditions.

I can never return to Faerie or my position within the courts.

I can never speak my true name, even if my mate is one day found.

And, I can never use my hands for healing in any way that could give away my birthright to the supernatural beings on Earth.

Of course, I break that last rule all the time. Human medicine is laughable at best. Sterile tools, broad-spectrum antibiotics, a parade of pills and ointments all used to mask what is fundamentally wrong with someone. Whether it’s spiritually, physically, energetically, or mentally. So, I do what I can.

I hide the harder to explain talents beneath the dull cloak of “good bedside manner” that all doctors should be required to have. A little penicillin supplemented with a touch of glamour, invisible toxins in the kidneys are massaged out with a feather light pass of my fingers. And no one suspects a thing.

If they did, I’d be dead.

At five, the clinic empties out. Though I linger, as always, far past the end of my shift. Everyone else has homes to get to, families or lovers that wait for them. And all I have to look forward to is a rented room above the shuttered bakery on Main, mixed with the long, lonely ritual of an evening spent in exile.

I scrub my hands in scalding water, trying to chase away the cold numbness from my glamour, and let my mind drift.

Sometimes, after a day of too many patients and not enough time to just breathe, I can’t keep my mind from wandering back to that last day in Faerie. Of the blood of a dear friend on my hands. Of the light of the council chamber throwing shadows over the masked elders. Of their deep voices mechanically joining together to deliver a sentence that would change my life in untold ways.

The aftermath had been less a flurry of emotion than a slow and glacial shattering of what I had known as my life. My friendships dissolved away within moments, lovers both past and present recoiled away from my presence, my mother’s hand on my shoulder for one brief moment and then never again. It doesn’t matter if I was guilty. The moment the elders deemed it so, so it must be.