Violet AshfordTonight
Bedside Manner
Halloween at the Aerie, the staff sent home and rain on the library windows. Violet Ashford comes down the spiral stair in a nurse’s white, and her one guest is flushed, restless and, in her professional opinion, not at all well. She lays a gloved hand over his heart, takes his temperature and makes her diagnosis: an acute condition, dangerously elevated, entirely curable. She is the treatment. She administers it herself, in complete sentences, and she never once raises her voice.
