Daisy rolled over in a creaking queen\nbed and faced the sliding glass door that led to a balcony\noverlooking a polluted slough of a slack river. She was alone. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She opened her eyes inside a motel room\nin Reedsport and squinted to block the light leaking through the\nthreadbare, cream-colored drapes. She checked the time on her phone:\n7:00 am. Ninety minutes before her shift began as an emergency room\nnurse at a hospital in Coos Bay, 30 minutes away. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was a Tuesday and the eleventh day\nof Christmas. She wore the vestiges of a slutty elf outfit her lover\nfrom last night had ordered and then ripped apart during coitus.\nApparently that helped him get off. Some men have it bad for anything\nelvish. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last night’s lover was a married\ndoctor, the same doctor she’d be assisting in the emergency room in\n90 minutes. He was married with five young children. She was single\nand childless. He was Mormon and believed it. She was agnostic and\ndidn’t. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Mormon made it six doctors from the\nhospital, Five men, one woman, all married. All Christians in one\ngeneric judgmental form or other. The number might have gone higher\nhad there been more doctors on staff. Only doctors for her. She\nseduced them with the sincerity and surety of gravity. She loved\nupending their textbook power dynamic and making them beg when she\ncut them off, which invariably she did with an ungrammatical text\nmessage accompanied by a bawling emoticon. Then when the fancy struck\nher, she texted a nude of herself fishing or chainsawing and seduced\neach and every one of them all over again. How the doctors never\ndiscovered each one was having an affair\u2014if affair is the word\u2014with\nthe same nurse in the same hospital always made her laugh. She knew\nthe reason. They were dumber than dirt. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Daisy got up from bed and felt the\nheadache of a slight hangover. She was used to it. She always came to\nwork in a fuzzy wine, whiskey or vicodin fog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She threw open the drapes and glass\ndoor to the balcony. She stepped outside and lit an American Spirit.\nRain fell in slanting walls. She looked out to the slough. A low tide\nexposed rotting pilings and an abandoned bicycle. A snowy egret\nhunted in the mud flats. White on brown never looked more beautiful.\nA herd of elk lounged in the pasture beyond the slough. Females only.\nAlways segregated herds with elk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Daisy dipped inside the room and\ngrabbed a bottle of champagne off the nightstand. There was a single\nswig left. She swigged it and then nibbled a cold cut from a snack\ntray. She went outside and smoked and stared at the slough. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She wanted to become a snowy egret and\nspend her time hunting in the mud. She wanted to join the elk herd\nand come together with a male one time during rutting season and eat\nplants the rest of the year. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then what? She didn’t know. Daisy\ndidn’t know anything about herself anymore except that she had to get\nto work. She finished her cigarette, but not before she saw the snowy\negret pluck a frog from the mud, lift off, and fly straight toward\nher. For a moment she thought it might fly right into the room, but\nit veered upward at the last second, so close Daisy could see the\nfrog wriggling in its beak. It struck Daisy as a beautifully sublime\ndeath that served an antediluvian purpose. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And it did. One that Americans could\nonly dream of emulating when they died. \n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Daisy rolled over in a creaking queen bed and faced the sliding glass door that led to a balcony overlooking a polluted slough of a slack river. She was alone. She opened her eyes inside a motel room in Reedsport and squinted to block the light leaking through the threadbare, cream-colored drapes. She checked the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5607,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","category-meditations","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5606"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5609,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5606\/revisions\/5609"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}