At first, the wristband refused to come out of the printer.
Paul Delmas tapped the casing twice with his fingertip, waited for the roller’s low rumble, then pulled the white strip before the machine had finished cutting it. The patient’s name appeared at an angle: SALOMÉ AÏT-BENALI, AGE 24, CARDIOLOGY 3B. Beside the barcode, the ink had bled across the last digit of her birth date.
“We’ll do it again,” he said.
Joël, the nurse, looked up from the medication cart.
“It’s readable.”
“It’s readable now. In six hours someone scans the wrong digit and we spend ten minutes working out why it doesn’t work.”
“In six hours I’ll be home.”
“And someone else will lose ten minutes.”
Joël gave a joyless smile, tore off a second band, and placed it on the cart. He had been working since morning; Paul for even longer, which was not an excuse but a fact no one wanted to discuss. In the corridor, bed wheels struck a seam in the flooring with a metronome’s regularity. A call bell sounded at the far end of the ward. Someone called “Mr. Laurent” behind a door.
Paul reread the band. The second was clear.
“Thank you.”
“Should I enter the event in the quality log?”
“Only if you want to kill someone with PowerPoint.”
Joël exhaled through his nose. The hospital version of a laugh.
Paul entered room 318 with the wristband looped around two fingers. Salomé Aït-Benali sat on the bed, legs crossed beneath her hospital gown, phone facedown on the table as though she had decided to punish it. At twenty-four she already looked familiar with the vocabulary of doctors trying to reassure without promising. Her mother occupied the chair by the window, handbag on her lap, held shut with both hands.
“We’re just changing your wristband,” Paul said.
Salomé held out her wrist.
“Is that the treatment?”
“That’s to stop us giving you your neighbor’s.”
End of excerpt. Discover the other stories in this universe.