About On Call: Crossroads

by PD Singer
35 pages / 8000 words
Ebook zipped file contains - html, lit, Adobe and Sony optimized pdf, prc, epub

Dr. Keith Hoyer has lost patients before but never like this, not at sixteen and not by intent. Certain that he could have prevented the tragedy with some word or deed that he left unsaid or undone, Keith is desperate for a way to redeem his failure.

If he's going to practice medicine in a Third World country, Keith's lover, veterinarian Dante James says, he needs time to sell the practice and brush up on diseases of goats. "Whither thou goest, I go," Dante tells Keith, but where will those words take them?

Sample

At the water's edge, I stopped. "Making me run faster keeps me from talking but not from thinking, Dante."

He wiped his forehead with the hem of his shirt. "You need to really think, Keith. Not grieve out loud. What could you have done differently? You reached out, you tried to offer help, you had one brief visit to talk to him, so what could you have done differently that would have avoided this?"

"I don't know!" I barked back. "I just don't know! Maybe I need to go back to school, learn some counseling, maybe I need to practice somewhere that just keeping them from dying of sepsis from a small cut is considered good care, maybe-- I don't know!" I picked up a rock from the shore and hurled it into the water, startling a Canadian goose that swam nearby with her brood. "But I feel like a failure doing what I'm doing here!" I hurled another rock and the goose ushered her little family in the opposite direction. Good move, goose; getting involved in what I'm doing isn't wise. "I feel like I need to expiate this, maybe go do some medical missionary work, I don't know."

"If you're going to leave for Haiti or the Philippines or somewhere like that, you need to give me enough time to sell the practice and brush up on diseases of goats."

I whipped around, jolted out of my rant by how serious he sounded. He gazed at me calmly, to all appearances utterly sincere about what he'd just said. "Diseases of goats?" I repeated, sounding stupid to my own ears.

"Yes, they're economically important animals in most places you'd go as a medical missionary. Cats, not so much; they reproduce pretty fast." He shrugged.

"Sell the practice?" I felt like I'd been slapped upside the head.

"Did you think you were going without me?" Dante did not smile when he asked that.

"No…"

"Then whatever you need to do, we need to plan together. Okay?" I nodded, and that got the first hint of a smile. "'Whither thou goest, I go.' For now, we run."