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Show Nocturne/ 2 hardly remembered having the energy to laugh. But they were quiet anyway. They tried to remember the last time they found anything at work humorous. The death pool came about as a final recourse. The nurses complained about the bans: Carolyn first, then Anika and Sydney together in the office, both bleary-eyed and yawning. Marianne Pittman protested too, rolling her eyes and tapping her feet impatiently near the charge nurse's desk. Others objected via email, promising to increase productivity if they could have their fashion magazines and their biographies back. Everyone complained but Lauren Elliot-she wanted to complain, but she did not. In their windowless hallway they could not see the sky, and their familiarity with the phases of the moon was limited to the tiny symbols printed on the calendar hanging near the nursing station. The halls intended sterility, exposing every spill on the tile and every finger smudge on the doorframes. In a dual effort to contain germs and to eliminate possible distractions, even starlight was not welcome. The death pool started as a joke one night while the nurses counted the tiles of the ceiling as the clocks chimed through the long windowless hours. The lottery's first iteration was merely a whisper. Anika was restless, and she had replaced her nightly reads about single women seeking romance for makeover fantasies. She imagined herself boarding an airplane with a new nose and a flat stomach, flying away on a day with a mackerel sky to a place where she did not need to know anything of needles or blood. Later, Anika did not remember how she thought of the death pool. She thought about their medical charts as harbingers. Anika and Sydney talked about many of the |