Belladonna

Belladonna was always meant to be small.

She was made to fit in a hand. To clip onto a lanyard. To ride along through twelve hour shifts and 3 a.m. medication checks without ever getting in the way.

Bats, as a rule, are not supposed to be comforting creatures. They hang upside down. They have tiny fangs. They are associated with things that go bump in the night. Belladonna found all of this rather unfair. She thought the night was simply the time when the people who needed the most watching over were often the most alone.

So she volunteered for the night shift.

She went home with a nurse — one of the nurses who has been looking after Winston on the leukemia ward. The kind of nurse who remembers which child likes which juice box, who knows when a worried parent needs a quiet word instead of a cheerful one, and who somehow keeps going through the long stretches when the ward is dark and the beeping machines are the only sound.

Belladonna clips to her lanyard now. She rides through every shift. She has tiny fangs and a purple bow and she is exactly four and a half inches tall, and none of that matters as much as the fact that when a nurse reaches for her during a hard moment, she is right there.

She does not fix anything. She does not make the medicine work faster or the nights shorter. She simply keeps watch. The way the best nurses do. The way the people who show up for the hardest work, again and again, always seem to do.

Belladonna is home. She is exactly where she was always meant to be.