Will Parrish

It is night again. That means the drones are back. The sound is not a sound anymore. It is a presence, like madness humming above your head. I am writing by the glow of my phone. My hands stink of antiseptic, salt, and something I do not name. There are no hospitals left in the north. No wards. No beds. Not even walls. Only this place we call a clinic: a half-body, half-ghost of medicine, clinging to life like those who enter it. And they come. They walk, some for more than thirty minutes through rubble, silence, and smoke, just for a strip of gauze, a word, a chance. They do not come seeking healing. They come because there is nowhere else left to bleed. Today, a woman came. Thirty-seven years old, though she moved like she had already died twice. Her hands, God forgive me, looked like they had been through a furnace. Cracked. Bleeding. Eczema? Yes, eczema, I said like a fool. But what is eczema when the sea has become your kitchen sink? She told me she washes her clothes and dishes with seawater. And toothpaste. No, not metaphor. Not poetry. Toothpaste. Because soap costs more than life here. Because she lives in a tent pitched between death and the next missile. I told her I would give her cream. I said it softly, like a lie you whisper to a child. I wanted to scream. I wanted to grab her shoulders and cry out, "You deserve a home. You deserve a sink. You deserve clean hands." But my own hands are not clean. I did not scream. I handed her the cream and looked away. I am no longer a doctor. I am a witness. To the slow murder of dignity. To a land where medicine is a cruel joke and survival is a sin. How do you treat a body when the soul is the one bleeding? The sea should cleanse. But here, it corrodes. Even the sea is tired of mercy. And God? He must be weeping, like the rest of us. Tonight, I will lie and imagine a world where I do not have to apologize to every patient for being human. I will imagine a world where handing someone cream is not an act of humiliation. But I will not sleep. No one here really sleeps. We only close our eyes and wait for the next scream. #GazaGenocide‌