Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

This was how they remembered it: The hospital was big and merciless. The sliding glass doors did not open with a vertical gap in the middle like most doors, but rather irised open like a mouth. The place was more sterile than an airport, and the people sitting in the waiting room were more like cut-outs than anything else; if you looked at them directly you would see them for their lack of depth, but Janelle had made sure to not look at them. A well-meaning doctor had said hello to them, opened another mouth in the building to get to the lift, and held it open with a strange and oversized speculum. “Come in. We will see your dead son now.”