I watch the dark house.

Somewhere far from here, one of the occupants is lying in a hospital bed frozen with pain. His parents and sister are clustered around him, but he doesn’t want to see any of them. His mother is suffocating, his father is distant and no help, and his sister is getting bored. He wants me, but I’m stuck here with no way to get to him.

I feel so helpless. He calls me an angel, but what kind of angel can I be if I can’t make his pain go away? So I call him one more time, to hear his agony-cracked voice whisper my name as he slips into morphine dreams. “I’ll be here when you get back,” I tell him.

And so I watch the house with its blank windows and lifeless lights, and I pray.