Nightshift 46: Patient Possessions Storage
[From here]As von Karma set foot inside this room, he clicked his flashlight back on and waved it around to see whether any dangers were present. So far, all he could see were two long shelves on either side of him, containing small, flimsy boxes in apparent alphabetical order
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If her main priority had been scavenging for things she might find a use for, her time might have been better spent in the storage room after her stint in the janitor’s closet.
Instead, Yomi stood in the threshold of the patient possessions room and pulled her flashlight out to illuminate the space within.
So this was where the hospital kept the “patient” belongings. Assumedly what they would’ve had on them when they’d arrived. What Yoshiko would have had. And there were rows and rows of such storage boxes, stored in a more orderly fashion than what’d been in the room she’d just left behind. For a moment, she didn’t move, merely kept letting her light drift amongst the shelves. There was no practical reason why she should be here. She’d taken her file with the partial desire to remove the copy from the records, but now wasn’t entirely sure if it hadn’t simply respawned in the filing cabinet the next night. No real assurance Yoshiko’s belongings wouldn’t do the same.
This, this didn’t make sense to the sesshouseki, and therefore didn’t to her. And yet she’d known where she’d wanted to go, what room had been at the end of this specific hall.
Here were pieces of Fujiwara Yoshiko’s life, fragments Yomi didn’t know, couldn’t dredge up from the dreamy memories she had. Real things that she could touch, even if she recognized their artificialness. Things that couldn’t be, in the same way that Yoshiko couldn’t be (at least before her birth in Yomi’s mind). The woman standing frozen in the doorway couldn’t name their value, only knew that they had some, had some pull over her. She wanted to see them for herself.
Her footsteps fell, muted notes in the dead silent room. It didn’t take long to discern that the boxes were stored alphabetically, the closest shelf to her full of surnames starting with As, followed by Bs… Once she’d found the F section, she stepped close, searching for one name amongst the rest. Fujiwara… And then there it was, caught in the light of her flashlight. Fujiwara, Yoshiko. It was just one box, one small, plain box, but such a gaping chasm opened in Yomi that it might as well have held the world inside. The sesshouseki was a hot flicker, hissing in her head. When she looked, however, her arms were already out, and she was pulling the box into them. Not too heavy. If she pulled the lid off, she could end the torture right here, see what was inside, what went along with the girl Yoshiko besides her intangible imprint. Artifacts of a life Yomi had never known.
A contrary urge kept her from doing it--not here, not safe--and with a strange sense of detachment, Yomi set down the flashlight, opened the top of the pillowcase, slipped off the box’s lid, and tipped the contents into the sack without seeing what was going in.
Yomi could look through her findings later, in her cell. Maybe her alter ego had some of interest, something she could use. Maybe…
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