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It was nearly nightfall. The sphere balanced on the tips of the bare tree branches outside sent a dull glow through the window into a small hospital room. The air inside was thick with the sweet, stifling odor of Febreze which pressed in around a young man in a swiveling chair in the corner of the room. He was chewing his bottom lip while scribbling on a clipboard. Periodically he threw a glance at a bed by the window in which an old woman lay.

The old woman’s pale red-rimmed eyes, two half-moons sunk deep into her skull, seemed on the verge of closing. Beneath them sagging flaps of skin hung down to the corners of her lips and below her chin. Two empty hands lay curled on the bed sheets swallowing her legs and feet and her ears could no longer discern the birds’ song and she lay in silence.

She had been ailing for months now. Emphysema, the doctor said. The word meant very little to her. All that mattered was that this disease would claim her in the end. There was no stopping it.

The young doctor rose from his swiveling chair and bustled from the room, closing the door behind him with a small snap. The only sound now was the perpetual hum of static emitted by the 15-inch PDI television in the corner, like bees buzzing around a flower. Outside the window the golden radiance of the sun was fading behind the whispering trees, casting swaying shadows across the silent bed sheets.

The old woman gazed at the blank wall opposite her and the doctor’s smoothly false face swam before her. And she remembered that same look polluting her husband’s face the day she returned in anguish from a job interview in the city. He had never really cared, she realized, if she got the job. He had not expected her to get it. It was not her place to make money, to support herself. And she remembered his cigarettes, the stench of him that permeated the carpets and the walls and the very air. It hung around his head in a dark cloud every evening and she tasted it on his lips when he returned from work. Now she was facing the consequences for what he had done. She was paying for it with her freedom. And as the old woman remembered her arms tensed and, as if of their own volition, began to push her upright. Her legs swung with sudden agility over the edge of the bed. The face of her husband was inside her and all around her and it mingled with the face of the young doctor and stared down on her. Pain stabbed at her lungs but there was blood roaring in her ears and defiance pumping from her heart out to her very fingertips and she did not yield.

The young doctor returned two minutes later to find the old woman crumpled in his swiveling chair, half-lidded eyes frozen as they stared through him. The tiny white hairs just below her nostrils no longer danced and the color was slowly draining from her lips. The golden ring no longer enclosed her finger but winked up at the doctor from the floor at her feet like a fallen star. She was at peace.

Outside the window the sun had set for the last time. Dusk descended on the room slowly. It crept first over the empty, rumpled bed sheets, then seeped to every corner of the room. It smothered the buzz of the television. It swallowed the thin form of the doctor standing motionless and staring with his back to the door. It swirled in silence and diffused into the stagnant air.