The patient in room three

by Silly Words

One Uneventful Night

With a sigh, nurse Coldheart laid down the book she was trying to read. I don't understand, she thought. Once more she let her eyes take in the cover illustration, where a tan female pegasus was just narrowly escaping the talons of a griffin. What does Rainbow Dash see in this? Peh. I wish the next part of Violet Rose would come out already.

She slowly took a sip from the cup on her right and looked, for a change, at the nearby grandfather clock. Just a while ago its chimes announced one hour after midnight. She disliked night duty. Not because of her job, but because she sometimes had a feeling that the patients were just trying to make fun of her. Mr. Fuzzy, for example. He was calling for her every hour, because he thought somepony was trying to steal his slippers. She didn't even have anything to calm him easily with, because he never brought slippers with him in the first place.

Her thoughts, drifting from the idea that she could buy him a few pairs, so that she could enjoy some quiet for the rest of her week, gradually changed into thoughts that doctor Stable was already finished with his night rounds and she might get away with resting her eyes a little...

That was when the buzzer rang.

Coldheard put on an annoyed face and turned to the panel with lights that represented individual rooms. In one of the rooms, there was a pony who wished for her attention. She was surprised when the light that signified room twelve remained dim. "Atleast it's not slippers again," she sighed and looked around the rest of the lights. And there it was. Room...

"Room number three? But... That's..."

---

Nurse Coldheart slowly opened the door. She expexcted the room to be shrouded in darkness. That's why she narrowed her eyes when the lamp light hit her. She still recognized the caged bed and the silhouette of the mare sitting on it.

"Good morning."

The nurse was known for rarely losing her cool. But to hear speech from a patient that only barked since they got her into the hospital, that was too much for her. She didn't even begin to wonder why somepony would call the middle of Luna's time 'morning'. She absentmindedly kicked herself, to make sure it wasn't a dream.

"Good morning?" answered the nurse uncertainly, when even the second kick didn't wake her. "Erm... You... You can speak?"

In the time her eyes accustomed to the light in the room. She could look closely at the caged mare. Her blue fur was still disheveled, but less than when she went to look how she is doing last time. The same could be told about her gray mane. When Coldheart checked on her in the evening, every strand of hair pointed into a different direction. They looked a bit less wild now, as if somepony tried to tame them with only her own two hooves.

"Yes, I can. I have to apologize. It's going to sound weird, but I can explain everything."

Coldheart gave the patient a critical glare. The same fur color, mane color, the same cutie mark. A screw. No mix-up. "I would like that very much. You can begin by telling me who you are."

"Of course. My name is Hiding Screw and I worked as the carpenter's assistant until the half of the last month," the blue mare started explaining.

That's consistent with what her friends said when they brought her in, the nurse thought.

"Mostly his inventory keeper," the imprisoned mare continued, "that's also what my mark represents. Even in a disorganized room, I can find every last thing, down to the last screw."

"Right. So what happened that you ended up here?"

"Do you know Lyra Heartstrings? She's a unicorn with strange ideas and an unhealthy interest in humankinds. At least I think that's what she calls them. I'm not really sure about the plural."

Coldheart nodded. She passed by Lyra a few times. Her style of sitting was easy to notice. She alone imagined Lyra would show up in the hospital when her spine gives in.

Hiding Screw continued: "She believes she's an incarnation of one of those creatures. I tried to convince her that she's just making herself believe things from an obscure fairy tale and that other ponies can lie to themselves in a similar manner. There was a lot of hot blood between us that evening. It ended in a bet. If I could convincingly act as a dog for a month, she's going to think about it. And by today's midnight the month ended."

Nurse Coldheart stared at Hiding Screw with a look of disbelief. "So... To sum it up. You let yourself be persuaded into acting like a dog. All that running around, barking and... other undignified acts were deliberate. All our attempts to calm you down and take care of you were only because of a bet."

"As I said, it sounds weird. But I'm fine. Thank you very much for how you treated me. The Ponyville clinic gives health care a great name. But I wish to return to my own bed now. If you could please let me-"

"No," the patient was interrupted by a strong answer from the nurse, who was just turning around to the door.

"Excuse me? Nurse?"

Coldheart took one last glace back before closing the door with the words: "You'll stay right where you belong."

Comments

[bobbananaville]

I find myself wanting to laugh, but at the same time unsure of myself.

You need to learn how to use commas and how to connect sentences together (Actually, I think you already had in your illuminati story), but otherwise I think that you're pretty good at English. And while there isn't really enough of a plot for me to 'like' it, I did enjoy it; and it was an interesting snapshot into ColdHeart's psyche (and indeed, those of Screwball Hidden Screw and Lyra as well). It's just that it's all that this story is.

[Silly Words]

5567654
Well, basically, this story was my actually first ever published piece. Not to mention it is translated from Czech to English, as opposed to written directly in English as my other sotry, and even then it was a written form of a short parody comic I was too lazy to even start drawing. I guess it being somewhat "bland" in the narrative department stems from that.
Anyway, thank you for the opinion.