i never look at their faces

by Sumitra Singam

I get home at midnight from a Casualty shift that was supposed to finish at eight. The front door groans me into my loneliness. The place is a barren, frigid void - furniture shopping is a thing for people with spare time, family, plans for their future. My eyes, dull and gritty from the stark hospital lighting adjust to the gloom, alight on the pot of instant noodles on the kitchen counter. My body is past hunger, leached, spent.

You appear as I pour boiling water into the noodles. More silver, less greyish - you flow like mercury. You perch your satin-clad arse on my kitchen bench.

“Not very nutritious, Doc.” You point at the one shrivelled apple in the fruit bowl, raising your eyebrow.

“Who are you?” my voice is calm, steady, like I use with the angry patients.

“Damn, Doc, that stings more than the actual dying.”

You hop off the bench, your stilettos making a tack-tack-tack sound on the peeling lino. As you move into the lamplight, something about the sway of your body, liquid and alive like silk, makes my breath catch. I polish my glasses on my scrubs, dank and lifeless from my gruelling shift.

“Use the microfibre cloth. You’ll scratch them.”

This is a trick, a hallucination.

I pour from the bottle I’ve uncorked, and as you pass by, you light up, jewelled ruby and garnet. There is a sunset bruise on the dorsum of your hand, at the junction of two veins, a scarlet wound like a mosquito bite bullseye on the bruise. You firefly-flit to my fridge, stove, counter.

My legs are leaden, sinking into the lino. I’d stood for the entire shift, hours hunched over a tiny lifeless body, alarms blaring; a teenager in a coma, her mother’s bony hands clutching, the cruel scent of antiseptic in my nose. It feels obscene to be hungry, to want to eat. I drop the noodle cup, dry retch into the sink.

You rub my back, and there is something achingly familiar, a muscle memory of me holding countless vomit bags, rubbing endless revolutions of the clock on all the overdose girls’ backs. “You’re okay,” you say.

Photo of Sumitra Singam

BIO: Sumitra Singam is a queer, neurodiverse Malaysian-Indian-Australian coconut who writes in Naarm/Melbourne. Her work has been published widely, nominated for a number of Best Of anthologies, and was selected for BSF 2025. She works as a psychiatrist and trauma therapist and runs workshops on how to write trauma safely, and the Yeah Nah reading series. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?). You can find her and her other publication credits on Bluesky: @pleomorphic2 & sumitrasingam.squarespace.com