THE REVIEW WINDOW
In Which Morleen Trapp Reviews the Notes and Finds a Chart Without Errors, Only a Voice
These are the serialized accounts for the novella, Working Terms. All tasks are mandatory. All emotions are optional. Welcome to your role in the system.
FROM THE LAST → Elias Rigg is summoned to a performative disciplinary training, masquerading as a “clinical literacy realignment,” after a post-mortem charting error, where he endures a surreal solo seminar led by a terrified corporate functionary and a PowerPoint cartoon. Confronted with the absurdity of documenting death through sanitized slogans and reflection wheels, Elias rejects the farce, walks out with peppermints in his pocket, and returns to the floor quietly changed; wary, watchful, and painfully sincere.
Hey! Here’s a button for the index to this serialized novella!
Let the record reflect that Elias Rigg—Nurse Technician I, unlicensed, unanchored, uncategorizable—had, for the first time in his well-documented tenure of unorthodox comportment, submitted a full seven days’ worth of vitals charting without a single technically actionable error.
This should have been a cause for celebration. Or relief. Or, at the very least, a brief deletion from Morleen Trapp’s clipboard-shaped anxiety: a mental folder she updated hourly with staff concerns too vague to report but too persistent to ignore.
Instead, what she felt, upon opening the review portal, which was rendered in grayscale, like an obituary, was a growing unease. Something wasn’t wrong, exactly, but it was off—elaborate. Too elaborate. Rigg’s notes were dense in the way bureaucratic apologies are dense: layered with self-insulation, plausible deniability, and a tone of practiced humility that barely concealed a deep, subterranean defiance.
Observe:
6:03: Patient semi-reclined, gaze fixed northward. Eyes open, unfocused. Initiated phrase “Just resting.” Tone: declarative. No supplemental utterances. Room mildly scented with disinfectant 3B (citrus forward).
And again:
6:04: Bed alarm disarmed, possibly by prior staff. Device placement observed: correct. Monitor illuminated but unrefreshed. RN entered and exited room without visible action. Charting her presence here as ambient variable.
And then came the one that made Trapp set down her badge reel, fold her hands slowly, and begin the ancient internal rite known as What Is This Idiot Doing Now:
6:06: Pulse: present. Rhythm: consistent. Delay noted between right and left radial pulses, though technician self-aware of left-hand placement inconsistency; hesitated to reattempt for fear of patient perceiving uncertainty. Opted to chart reflective note instead of risking interpretive error.
There it was: self-narration, a mirror. A diary written in the third person and disguised as documentation.
She kept reading. Each entry was more meticulous than the last. She toggled open the metadata and discovered he had spent nearly nine full minutes charting a blood pressure check, another six on a temperature that read 98.7 (though this somehow warranted a two-sentence meditation on “oral thermometer placement variance and patient reluctance to uncurl tongue”). At one point, he timestamped a hallway conversation with a float nurse and included her tone of voice.
He was, to put it plainly, documenting vibes.
She reread the entry and rubbed her eye, the left one, which only twitched under very specific emotional provocations: disgust, nervous delight, and what her therapist once called projection via hierarchy. She looked again.
This wasn’t a mistake or a cry for help. Elias Rigg had entered into some kind of covenant with the EMR system, with reality, with God knows what, wherein he believed that if he simply recorded enough, no one could accuse him of absence. That perfect charting might protect him from future guilt, or worse: from being unremarkable.
Trapp stood up, sat down again, closed the screen, reopened it, and scrolled. She was no longer searching for errors. Now, she was looking for something harder to quantify: meaning, intent, tone, voice.
That was the real problem.
He had one.
He had a voice in the notes. An actual one, not the sanitized language of procedural compliance or the autocorrected grammar of accountability, but something unnervingly human. Maybe literary.
She wrote a private note to herself:
Rigg, E.—Review in person. Charting style becoming florid. Possibly unstable or gifted. Unclear which is riskier.
She did not send it.
Instead, she scheduled a “walk-and-talk.”
Subject line: *Touch Base: Vitals Process Flow :) *
She deleted the smiley face. Then added it again. Then stared at it for a very long time.
UP NEXT → THE TOUCHPOINT STRATEGIST: In Which a Corporate Consultant Encounters an Unknown Voice in the System and Mistakes It for a Revelation
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