The Sunrise

by Matthew Chi (17)

The sun has just begun to rise, pitted with clouds and barely visible over the horizon formed where the sky meets the ocean. Vast swaths of sand stretch out parallel with the water, shadowed by an inland forest, trees parted like teeth. Amidst the forest rises a mountain range, the peaks creating a curved line winding through the sky like the calloused back of a leviathan, rising amidst a sea of green.

And, at the base of the mountain closest to the coast, rests a village. A crowd of homes nestles in one area, bars and smithies and market buildings throughout, with farms littering the fields further away. A simple dirt road covered in footsteps layered like palimpsests finds its way through the forest to the sands that mark the beginning of the ocean, ending upon the top of a sea arch, where a tiny figure stands, clothed in white, barely visible against the terracotta brown. Fishing boats rest further upshore, the hulls warped by sea and salt and smothered by algae, by barnacles, unused. 

The village, aside from the farms and a single pub, slumbers yet. Even nature knows to hold itself in silence, its songs stillborn. Yet out by the coast walks a man. He looks down, his eyebrows creased and lips quirked downwards as he stares towards the ocean waves, wrinkling his youthful countenance with forehead lines that won’t persist beyond this moment until he’s far older. He’s dressed in a once-white coat, pocked with brown splotches—blood and dirt. A large leather bag is slung over his shoulder. The seam of the opening flap is frayed, and the left slide is slightly torn, revealing a set of medical blades and some bandages—he won’t be using them, but he keeps with him at all times. 

He comes here every day to mull over his previous patients. Most mornings, the sunrise gives him a little bit of hope. Today it does not. The sheen on the water from the rising sun, the dark blots of sky that the sun has yet to dispel, and the waves that continue to pour as mindlessly as his patients afflict him with frustration, driving his eyes further downcast. Using a rock, he carves an X into the ground atop the sea arch. He tells himself that he will throw himself off the edge tomorrow if the mark remains. 

He thinks of one of the first patients he treated: a teenage boy. The boy’s face had been struck by the grotesque horn of a bull let loose from one of the farms when the gate to the field was left unlocked. The wound looked far worse than it actually was, just needed to be treated quickly, as if the blood and pus wept more out of pain than genuine injury. 

His father, formerly the apothecary of the village, had sent him away to study medicine in the city with what little money he had left behind. The newly-appointed doctor had only returned a week or two ago and was still adjusting to working when the bull had discovered the unlatched gate and loosed itself. As the first formally-trained doctor the village had known, the inhabitants thus bombarded him with appointments over both trivial concerns and extremely severe cases, exacerbated by the fact they had gone unaddressed. They wandered down the ivied alleyways to his office, carrying colicky children and leading aging parents whose liver spots and bandage-wrapped tumors elicited equal alarm. People would gather in his waiting room throughout the day, and often he stole away time for himself, sitting idly in his office as he pretended that he was tending to a patient. Gazing out the window towards the waves that crashed endlessly ashore, he wondered, agonized over how he would haul his worn body out of bed to continue on tomorrow, and the day after that, and after that, marching one step at a time, each day a new wave of new magnitude, towards whatever indeterminate fate time held for him. 

He was living in pieces of himself—one brooding over how to inform a patient that they were dying, one levering his bleary eyelids open when they threatened to shut for the night and more, one struggling to keep up after overscheduling—and the boy needed attention. He’d skipped lunch and breakfast that day to continue seeing patients. He had become accustomed to graphic scenes at medical school, but the lack of sleep, the smell of salt from the waves just outside, a hollow hunger pinching the walls of his stomach, and the dull stress that reminded him tomorrow would be no easier nauseated him as he worked on the torn flesh of the patient’s face. When stitching the skin back together, his hand slipped and he buried the suture in the patient’s neck. The sharp tip slid itself into the boy’s skin, more effortlessly than any incision he had made before, driving him to his knees as he fell forward. A heat filled his face as he looked downwards at the blood forming a bubble atop the boy’s throat and coating his own hands, a revolting sticky feeling. He closed his eyes and—he awoke to the sound of waves and clamor of the waiting room. 

He remembers the moments leading up to it: the smell of both dried and fresh blood, the young boy’s eyes, worried and distressed, the body, which was completely still yet looked so desperate to move, the hair brushed back to reveal the torn skin, the little pieces of cloth to the right, stained with blood, the shaking of his hands, his irregular breathing, the taught line of the thread cutting into his unstable fingers, and the cold lifelessness of the needle. 

The patient died that day. It was his fault. 

He thinks of the old man, months after the boy died. He was managing his schedule now, learning how to shoulder each patient, each of their worlds that drooped over his back and threatened to send him once more to his knees. This patient had begun to forget things, a field outside of the doctor’s expertise, but he promised the family he’d do his best. He spoke to them about previous major events the old man had experienced—like the birth of his grandchildren or his daughter's wedding—and did his best to try and recreate them, hoping that the man’s mind might turn from sieves, memories slipping through, to fishnets, dredging old water for any fish that remain. He tried medicine, scoured dozens of books, consulted cures more ritual than science, mixed foreign herbs with foreign fungus—anything, even the remedies of alchemists, that might work. 

Nothing did. But what the old man did remember was one song, a barely-coherent lullaby he once sung to his children, then to his grandchildren, and now to himself, eerily drawn out and soft, shifted flat and made raspy by his aged voice. Every day he would sing it, over and over and over and over and over and over. 

He remembers sitting in the living room of the family’s home, feeling so defeated, trying to think of another solution. He remembers the feel of the wooden stool, the uneven legs shifting beneath him; the well-loved table, hand carved from oak; the mystique glow fireplace, flames writhing upon logs; the drum of the knives on the cutting board; the sound of the pots, hissing with boiling water; the medical book on the table, spine brittle from constant opening and closing; his bag leaning beside the stool, open, his notebook revealed, papers peering out between the pages, blanketed with handwritten notes describing failed treatment after failed treatment; the little children that scurried and dashed around, giggling; their father, his face disfigured with wrinkles and worry, begging them to calm down and not distract “the doctor,” as his voice churned with anguish; the old man sitting in the rocking chair, swinging back and forth gaily, his face rictusing into a clueless grin; and the humiliating song he sang over and over that burned a bright, angry red into the cheeks of the doctor. 

Two hours later, his singing stopped. 

He thinks of the worst patient he’d treated. The hardest for him to face. Fearing what little sunlight has begun to emerge, he pulls his eyes shut, hoping it will hold back the sorrow welling forth. He draws ten red lines through his cheeks and brow, nails digging away hearty flesh, hoping that he might claw away whatever vestiges of memory store that moment. 

No such good flesh for the little coal devoured by a furnace, the son of the village blacksmith. His father had kept him up through the night to help him complete a project for the next day, and, in his haste, despite all his mastery, slipped, spilling molten metal from a massive crucible on his son, cooking him alive. The doctor, lying awake in internal torment, had heard the deafening cries of anguish. In the late hours of the night, he plucked himself from his bed with such great reluctance as to render him bowbacked and wave-like, his head the trough hanging forward from the crest of his slumped shoulders. 

Finally, he lifted himself upright and hurried to the home, doing his best to save the child. The boy’s left arm and left leg were doused and the skin on his stomach had also been splashed, destroying the nerves and flesh. He was forced to amputate the whole forearm and the calf, just below the knee. Everything from that moment still ruthlessly weighs upon him and leaves his head bowed once more: the sound of the roaring furnace, the light from the lamps, the sounds of his medicinal blades cutting through skin, the smell of metal and flesh and oil, the father muttering to himself in despair—doctor, doctor, please save him, the refrain of the lost—the sound of bubbling metal on the ground, the smell of burning, and the boy writhing on the floor as he operated. 

The boy would live, but a reminder of the incident would forever remain. Scars across his body, scars across his father’s mind.

The doctor began to walk back to the village. In the early morning, the light peers through the trees, casting little pebbles of light on the ground, and illuminating the foliage. The wind rustles the leaves and the dirt road softens under his feet. Clouds overhead dot the sky, splotches of gray against the blue. 

Arriving at the village, he finds it lively now. 

As he gets closer to the village, he hears chatter. People turn to look at him when he arrives. Their eyes are filled with malice and scorn. They began to mutter to one another, barely audible. 

She died this morning. Where was he when he was needed? Is he even qualified? Did you see how he left the blacksmith’s son? Hear the old man’s singing? How many patients under his care didn’t get better? 

He must enjoy seeing us ill and unwell. He makes money off of our suffering, does he not? 

The doctor ignores them all, pushing his way through, refusing to respond to the whispers of the crowd.

He truly thinks that he’s above us all. He holds no regard for others. 

He hurries to his home, a small single story stone building in the center of the village that doubled as his store. A single chimney expels tendrils of smoke and a sign that reads Apothecary rests on a chipped, ruddy wooden door. To the left of the entrance lays an herbal garden and to the right sits a pudgy old man, a well-known bartender for the town, leaning against the side of the doctor’s home, kneeling by the cold, motionless body of his wife. Upon seeing the doctor, the man glares at him with bleary, bloodshot eyes. 

Wherever the doctor goes, he is always needed. He approaches the man and, without a word, lifts the body of the woman and carries her inside, her shallow remaining breaths faint on his neck. Placing her upon the operating bed, he works silently even when the bartender enters. 

Word gets around: “The doctor is bringing the dead back to life.” Much of the town gathers to watch him work. They fill the room with their bodies, their thronging, their breathing, their whispers. After knotting the final stitch, the doctor pushes his way through the crowd, stumbles to his room, and collapses on his bed without a word to anyone. 

He awakes to the sound of crying: the woman woke up that following morning. The bartender’s tears are accompanied by half-formed words, cut short by coughs and sobs. Before the sun had even risen, the entire town gathered in the bar and sang praises of the doctor. His identity was dissected and sewn together amidst his sleep, cured in whispers and rumors of the night.

Feeling proud, contemptuously proud, the doctor leaves to take his usual early morning stroll, relishing the way that once spiteful gazes turn to astonishment as they watch him amble by. 

He comes upon the shore once more, gazing out at the sand as he climbs to the top of the sea arch and walks closer to the edge, gripping his bag tightly. He sees that the X survived the night. Crossing his legs, he sinks down onto the ledge, gazing out to the horizon. There, the sea itself flows forever into a paper-flat sheet of blue, practically unaffected by elevation or perspective. Only the waves grow small.

Struck by awe, the doctor begins to reflect. No matter how ungrateful, no matter how irritating, no matter how frustrating, no matter how entitled they all are, he will endure it all—and he will feel happy when they survive. Even if nobody comes to thank him when they are healthy, even if they complain when they are unwell, even if nobody comes to care for him when he is unwell, he will do his best to save them all, for that is to be a doctor. To heal.

Placing his palms upon the stones, the doctor helps himself up, the gravel and stone stinging his palms but ultimately just another sensation, a reminder of his living. He sees the horizon and the clouds strewn across the sky. He sees the sheen of the ocean, reflected light dancing across the uneven surface of the water. He sees the sunrise. 

Overcome by a giddy joy, he leaps forward and grinds the X away, peeling away layer upon layer of dirt with his heel. And as he gazes into the sunrise, his heel reaches a little further than the X, a little further than the ledge, where the rock has begun to erode, a wound in the stony skin. He falls. 

The morning waves swallow him up.