Mary always said if she got to Walter Reed she’d quit. She was on the floor with them now, losing sleep with the gimps who had the positive outlook, the innocents pure wounded, the wise alecks shut up. She could hear them at night, the amputees especially. She dreamed about a man with phantom arms reaching for her, chasing her, but her crutches, which they said she needed and she had to agree she did, crunched in half like they were made of candy brittle.

She woke from it. Listened, felt maybe she should investigate. Just walk down the hall and see what she thought was a whisper, whether it really was. Because she swore she heard the boy she’d met in her therapeutic walks with her intravenous piping on its jerkily rolling frame.

The guy had no right leg. Right, the leg on her that was mutated, space-age, supernatural. She could see him, this new unfortunate, coming at her in the hallway. She and he had crutches, a pair apiece. And they had to stilt themselves toward each other, facing each other, he watching her right leg, she watching his one leg.

And their eyes, what else to do with their eyes? Whenever she saw him in the hallway, she could feel him feeling that question. Once, he tripped, not really falling, because he was in some harness with an aide on either side of him. Tonight, lying in her bed, she remembered how from a distance in the hallway her special amputee had been roughened sexy, the guy who could take you in his arms standing straight and hold your ass in his hands with the studied attention you saw in movies. So the first time he got close enough, her thoughts were tending that way, and without trying she was the one who tripped. It got her piping pulled out and the top of her hand jam-red, the itchy little needles popping out. Their eyes met. Better that they meet when she was vulnerable and bloody. Because they both knew she was the stronger.

She lay there in the dark remembering. There it was again. The whisper like someone in grade school, when the teacher’s back was turned. She could see her crutches, propped on a chair. She was well enough to drag her IV to them.

She rose up some, babying her left hand’s crochet of piping, taking a careful, firm grasp on a point beyond the needles, so they wouldn’t, even if she slipped some, come free.

She hopped. It felt good. Fun, even. Pull, pull—nicely she tugged the intravenous tangles. She reached the crutches and gingerly let go of the lacing tubes of her left hand. Got the first crutch. Wished she could have twirled it like a majorette. She used it to retrieve the second one, bring its padded top to her left hand. She stood there for a moment. She’d not thought about how to bring along the IV mechanicals with both hands occupied with crutches.