Daniel Bradford

Control

The form has twelve sections. She is in section four.

Section four is called ‘Patient History’. There is a box for significant events. The box is 3.5 centimetres tall.

She writes: the smell of the waiting room. Disinfectant and someone else’s lunch. The chair that rocked if you sat on the left side. A poster about hand-washing, its laminate lifting at one corner - she’d picked at it each visit until she’d peeled it clean off and no one replaced it for three years.

She does not write: my mother’s voice through the partition. What it sounded like at the end.

The box fills.

She ticks what the form wants ticked. Dates. Medications. Incidents, yes or no.

In the margin - there is a margin, narrow, not meant for writing - she makes a mark. Not a word. Not a symbol either. A line: proof that her hand was here, that she was present and chose what to leave out. Evidence of editing, which is also a kind of authorship.

The form is collected.

She keeps her copy. Folds it into her coat pocket, where it will go through the wash and come out soft as cloth, the ink gone to shadow, the boxes dissolved.

She thinks: the form will go to a file. The file to a system. The system to a server that belongs to a trust that is overseen by a board that answers to a body that has never been in this room, that does not know what is missing from section four, that will never know what the silence in the 3.5-centimetre box contains.

She puts on her coat.

Outside it is raining, which is ordinary. The street is ordinary. She is ordinary in it, which is the point, which is the whole point, which took her longer to understand than anything the form ever asked her.