"Emergency": This piece about two friends/acquaintances who work in an ER together, and who both steal pills from the hospital. The whole story - a single day in their lives - is told through the tripping eyes of one of the friends. First, they are handling a patient with a knife stuck in his eye, and the narrator's perception of events and dialogue is really quite surreal - almost a super-heightened sense of realistic truth. This same sense is continued when the narrator and Georgie leave the hospital and drive, ultimately having an encounter with poor little dead baby rabbits :(. Overall, this story gives a sense of a sad reality that is only seen through a sort of vivid-drug-haze.
"Escort": This piece is about a man looking back on the time he spent as a hospice escort. He would take dying hospice patients and their relatives around the city sightseeing, all as a result of a happen-stance in which he chose to do this "date" as a good deed, and then wanting to continue. We learn that the narrator grows close to these patients and stays with them until death, and then always receives a hand-made throw blanket from the relative. He cannot seem to part with these blankets, and he eventually stops being an escort, though we do not know why exactly. Here, too, the reader gets a sad sense of reality that is only seen when put in a situation that makes you more aware.
The style that these two short stories are written in is very striking to read. Dialogue and narrator thoughts are sharp and no-fluff, and no gritty details are spared or glossed over. I think it would be very difficult to write in this style just because you, as a writer, have to figure out what this reality is that you're trying to reveal and what raw details would do the job.
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