Closing

A short story

We arrive sometime in the mid-afternoon, parking the car in one of twenty empty spaces. We are here to see my grandfather, a man who has spent the last ten years in slow inexorable decline. The hospital is now all but abandoned, a once-thriving NHS outpost deep in the valley, lost to dust. The entrance hall is deserted, and each corridor had been stripped of every defining detail. There is a smell of disinfectant. Only one ward remains open, where my grandfather sleeps, attended by a skeleton crew of three or four. I turn a corner and pass along the final corridor, through two security doors, and wonder whether this time he will wake up.