3
Twenty-five miles away, in the center of the oldest town in the county, Elijah Cajal didn’t get many visitors, either. That was how he liked it. He figured he spent enough time talking to people at work.
Elijah was a medical student. He worked as an apprentice to the only doctor in his town, Dr. Leonard. He was almost finished with his training, though it usually felt to him that this part of his life would never end.
This was his night off, and he was spending it in the usual way: lying in bed, scrolling on YouTube, finding nothing worth watching. The practice was more meditative than anything. He never really expected to find anything, but he looked anyway. Scrolling was better than going to bed. Going to bed just meant waking up, and waking up just meant going back to work.
He checked his phone. There was a message from his mom, sent a few hours prior: You were supposed to call today.
“Shit.” He looked at the time: 11:39.
His thumbs darted across the screen: I’m so sorry, I’ll call tomorrow. Love you.
He turned off his phone and let his head fall back against his pillow.
What a stupid life, he thought. He was in his mid-twenties and had nothing to show for it. What was the point of all that education if it amounted to this?
He let himself sink a little deeper into the guilt. Why hadn’t he just called her? He hadn’t been doing anything besides sitting around. Maybe it was because he knew how the conversation was going to go, because all of his conversations with his mom had been going the same way recently. She would ask him how work was going, he would say it was good but exhausting, she would say she hated to see him “living like this,” and he would say there’s no other choice.
Frankly, Elijah hated to see himself living like this, too. It wasn’t what he’d imagined when he started medical school. But then, who could have predicted that medical training would be so taxing? A lot of people, he supposed.
Dr. Leonard was the only doctor in town, and Elijah the only doctor-to-be (he preferred this term over “medical student”). All the other doctors had retired or fled. He recalled something Dr. Leonard said a few times a week: “Medicine is a dying art, and rural medicine is a dead one.”
Dr. Leonard is an amazing mentor, a once-in-a-lifetime kind of person, Elijah would text his mom when she protested about his endless hours on the job. It seems like nobody else cares about this place, but he does.
He looked at the time again. 11:57. He’d stayed up too late. He’d be meeting Dr. Leonard in six hours. He looked up at the ceiling, suddenly exhausted, and knew he would fall asleep almost immediately. He thought of his mom as he drifted off.
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