The plastic taste of the breathing tube coated the back of my throat, thick and foreign, something my body kept trying to reject and couldn’t. The lights above the bed were too bright, haloed and blurred, and every time I tried to blink them into focus the effort cost me something I didn’t have to spare. The machine beside me hissed in a rhythm that belonged to no one, certainly not to me, just a steady mechanical insistence that my chest rise and fall at the intervals it had decided were correct. I felt like a puppet whose strings had been handed to a stranger while I watched from somewhere slightly above and to the left of my own body.
I could not speak. Moving my arms brought a deep, grinding protest from my abdomen, the kind of pain that suggests the body has been rearranged and is not pleased about it. But I could see.
I saw my mother’s purse strap slide up over her shoulder, her fingers adjusting it with the automatic efficiency of a woman who was already mentally somewhere else. I saw my father shrug into his worn team jacket, the one with the school mascot embroidered over the heart, a gesture so practiced it contained no hesitation at all. My mother glanced at the clock on the wall, and her mouth tightened slightly, the particular expression of someone doing calculations.
“We really have to go,” she said. She used a soft tone, as if the softness were a form of apology, as if the quietness of the words could renegotiate their content.
My father stepped closer to the bed. His face looked wrong at the edges, blurred by the tears that had gathered in my eyes without my permission. He patted my hand the way you pat an animal to reassure it that what’s about to happen isn’t personal.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said. “Just rest, okay? Be good. Be supportive.”
Be a good sister. He didn’t say it this time but he didn’t have to. Those words had been part of the furniture of my childhood for so long they occupied space without being spoken. Be understanding. Be reasonable. Be less.
The monitor beside me beeped slightly faster. I couldn’t have told you whether it was pain or rage.
My mother leaned down, careful not to disturb any of the tubes. She was wearing perfume, something floral and expensive, and the smell of it was wrong in a room that still carried the antiseptic sharpness of a place where serious things happen to bodies. She spoke slowly, the way people speak to someone they’re not sure is fully present.
“Tyler’s team made the playoffs,” she said. “They moved the game because of the weather forecast. If they win tonight, there could be scholarship conversations. You understand, don’t you?”
I couldn’t nod. The tube, the immobilization, the weight of everything conspiring to keep me still. I blinked once, because blinking was all I had, and because twenty-three years of habit is stronger than almost anything.
My father took the blink as agreement. Of course he did.
“That’s my girl,” he said. “We’ll be back. They said you’ll be out of the woods by morning.” He glanced at the nurse standing in the doorway, who was holding a chart and an IV bag and looking between us with the particular expression of a professional trying to decide how much to say. “Right?” he added.
“She’s stable,” the nurse said carefully. “But this was serious surgery. She needs rest, and it would be better if someone could stay with her.”
“We’ll be back,” my mother repeated. Then again, more to herself than to me: “We just can’t miss this.”
I wanted to scream. I wanted to tell them that my intestines had been cut apart and reattached, that I had been in surgery less than an hour after a surgeon used the words “ruptured appendix” and “peritonitis” and “very lucky you came in when you did.” I wanted to tell them that the only reason I had driven myself to the emergency room in the first place was that when I called from the clinic, my mother’s first response had been, “Tyler has practice, can you drive yourself?” I wanted to say it out loud, the simple, undeniable fact: I could have died today. I want you to stay.
Instead I blinked again, and a tear slid warm into my hairline, and my parents’ footsteps moved down the corridor, and the elevator chimed, and the machine kept breathing for me.
My name is Skyler Hill. I was twenty-three years old. I was a veterinary surgical assistant who spent my days in an operating room saving animals’ lives, which is a thing my parents would not have been able to tell you if you asked them, and I was lying in a hospital bed with a ruptured appendix and a machine doing my breathing, and the two people who were supposed to love me unconditionally were getting into their car to drive to a football game.
I don’t know exactly how long I lay there. Time in a hospital after surgery is a strange thing, it compresses and expands and doubles back on itself, and the sedation added another layer of unreality to the whole experience. I know that I cried without being able to do anything about the crying, the tears sliding sideways into my ears in the way that somehow makes everything worse, warm and then cool and then itching, and I couldn’t wipe them away.
That was how Maria found me.
She was short, with dark hair tucked under a surgical cap and the quick, practiced movements of someone who has been doing this work long enough that efficiency and compassion have merged into a single gesture. Her badge swung when she walked and her sneakers squeaked faintly against the floor. She checked the monitors with quick hands, noted something on the chart, and then turned and looked at my face.
“Oh, honey,” she said.
She pulled a small whiteboard from a holder on the wall and a dry-erase marker, the way a magician produces something from thin air, and slid it under my left hand, curling my fingers around it.
“The tube stays in a little longer,” she said. “But you can write.”
It took effort. Each stroke of the marker sent a tug through my abdomen that required concentration to push through. But I managed two words.
Brother’s game.
She read them, and something moved across her face in sequence: surprise, then anger, then something that settled into professional containment, though her jaw tightened visibly. She pulled the plastic chair to the bedside and sat down.
“I’m Maria,” she said. “I’m your nurse until six in the morning.”
Six in the morning felt like a country I had no map to reach. I reached for the marker again, my letters uneven and jagged.
You don’t have to. I’m used to it.
She read the words and looked up at me, and the expression on her face frightened me more than the pain did.
“That,” she said quietly, “is exactly why I have to.”
She reached over and smoothed my blanket across my shoulders, a small and completely ordinary gesture, the kind of thing you do for someone you’re taking care of. It nearly undid me.
In the months and years that followed, I would come to understand that this was the moment the real surgery happened. Not the one in the operating room, though that one had saved my life in the literal sense. This one: a stranger sitting down in a plastic chair by my bed at whatever hour of the night, choosing to stay when she had no obligation to, making that particular gesture that said without a word: you are a person who deserves to have someone present.
The first six hours of that night were a blur of pain cycling through intensities and consciousness coming and going in fragments. Each time I surfaced, Maria was there. Adjusting the IV, checking the bandage, wiping my face with a cool cloth when I started to sweat. Once, when the pain spiked and my body tried to thrash against it, she held my hand and said things I couldn’t fully parse but somehow believed. She talked to the equipment with the casual familiarity of someone who has spent years in relationship with machines.
“Come on,” she told the blood pressure cuff when it squeezed too hard. “Don’t be rude.”
Around three in the morning, when the hallway noise faded and the building settled into its nighttime frequency, she told me about her two adult children, one a nurse, one a teacher, both living in other states. She told me about being the middle of five siblings in a family where visibility required effort. She told me about her youngest breaking his arm at a playground when she was at work, about how she had driven to the hospital furious at herself for not arriving faster.
“I kept thinking,” she said, “he was scared and I wasn’t there to hold him.” She shook her head. “I can’t imagine choosing to be somewhere else.”
The words settled into me and stayed there.
By the time the breathing tube came out the following day, tugged free by the respiratory therapist in a process that felt approximately like a snake being extracted from my chest cavity, I had made several decisions. The decisions were not impulsive. They felt, if anything, like things that had been forming for years and had simply been waiting for a situation serious enough to finish the work.
“I need to make some calls,” I said. My voice came out in fragments, hoarse and rough.
Maria, who had come by on her break to check on me, raised an eyebrow. “Family?”
“Lawyer,” I said, and coughed. “And my boss. And a moving company.”
She watched me for a moment, reading something in my face. Then she nodded and went to get my phone and some ice chips.
The first call was to Dr. Patricia Hendris, who ran the veterinary clinic where I’d worked for the past two years and who had been the person to insist I go to the ER when I showed up pale and hunched in the staff bathroom doorway, unable to stand straight.
“Alive,” I said when she answered, before she could ask. “Emergency surgery. Ruptured appendix.” I paused. “My parents left for Tyler’s playoff game.”
A silence. Then, in a different register entirely: “Of course they did.”
“The partnership in Seattle,” I said. “The one I told you I wasn’t ready for because I wanted to stay near family. Is it still open?”
“Skyler, you are in a hospital bed.”
“I know where I am. Is it still open?”
She exhaled. “Yes. And I understand what you’re doing. But this is a big decision.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m making it now, before I talk myself out of it again. Because if I don’t do it now, I’ll go home, and I’ll wait for next time to be different, and next time won’t be different. I’ve been waiting my whole life for next time to be different.”
The silence on her end was different now, the kind that comes from someone who recognizes something true.
“Okay,” she said finally. “All right. The head vet there owes me a favor. You can do light duties at first, paperwork and monitoring, nothing physical until you’re cleared. I know someone who has a spare room while you find your footing.”
“You don’t have to go this far,” I said.
“Let me show up for you,” she said. “Somebody ought to.”
The other calls were almost easy by comparison. My landlord was warm and immediate. My lease was month to month, medical emergency, no problem. The moving company was brisk and capable. The bank required hold music and security questions but eventually processed what I needed. I opened new accounts. I updated my address. I closed the digital doors that had always been left cracked open.
By the time I set the phone down, I was shaking and exhausted and more certain than I had been about anything in recent memory.
My parents arrived on day three.
They brought flowers from the hospital gift shop, bright and impersonal, with a half-crumpled congratulations balloon attached as if whoever purchased it had simply grabbed the nearest thing with a string. My father set them on the windowsill and forced a smile in my direction.
“There she is,” he said. “Look at you, sitting up. That’s good progress.”
“Hi,” I said. My own voice sounded flat to me, the way a room sounds flat when you’ve removed everything that absorbed sound.
Mom perched on the edge of the chair, the one Maria had pulled close to my bed two nights earlier and sat in for six hours. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Like someone cut open my abdomen,” I said. “While I was alone.”
Dad’s smile tightened. “You were sedated, Skyler. You don’t even remember most of it.”
“I remember enough.”
“Well,” he said, shifting his weight, reaching for the familiar subject the way people reach for something to hold in a room that has gone cold, “the good news is Tyler’s team won. They’re going to state. All those years of work paying off.”
I looked at him. I waited for what came after. The acknowledgment, perhaps. Some small movement of the conversation in my direction.
It didn’t come.
“Congratulations,” I said. “I’ve been here for seventy-two hours.”
Mom crossed her arms, a posture I recognized from years of having conversations she found inconvenient. “The team needed us,” she said. “You know how much this means for Tyler’s future. Scouts were there. Coaches wanted to speak with families. We couldn’t just disappear.”
“What about my future?” I asked.
They exchanged a look. I had seen that look so many times over the years that I could have described it with my eyes closed: the slight widening of the eyes, the small shared breath, the silent agreement that I was being dramatic and difficult and should be waited out.
“You have a good job,” Dad said. “You’re independent. You’ve always been the one who didn’t need—”
“I didn’t need,” I said, “because I learned early that asking didn’t produce results. That’s not independence. That’s adaptation.”
“Skyler.” Mom’s voice carried the warning tone she had always used when she needed me to stop before I went somewhere she didn’t want to follow.
“You want to know something?” I said. “When I called from the clinic, before I drove myself to the ER, your first question was whether it could wait until after practice. I had a ruptured appendix. The surgeon said if I’d waited a few more hours it could have gone very differently. And your first instinct was to ask whether the timing was convenient.”
“That’s not fair,” Dad said. “We were there when you went into surgery. We signed the forms. We were there.”
“And gone when I woke up,” I said. “The machine was breathing for me. I couldn’t speak. I wrote two words on a whiteboard: Brother’s game. And a nurse I’d never met sat with me for six hours because the two of you drove to a football game.”
The silence that followed had a different quality from the ones before it. Even my parents, practiced as they were at not hearing what they didn’t want to hear, seemed to register that something had shifted.
“We love you,” Mom said, and her voice was shaking now, the first genuine emotion I’d seen from her in three days. “We love both of you equally.”
“Can you tell me my job title?” I asked.
Dad opened his mouth. Closed it.
“What do I do?” I asked. “At work. What exactly does my job involve?”
“You work with animals,” he said. “You’re a vet person.”
“I’m a veterinary surgical assistant,” I said. “I monitor anesthesia. I scrub in on procedures. I spend my days in an operating room helping save lives. You have never once asked about it. You text me when you need free flea medication for Tyler’s dog. That is the extent of my professional existence in this family.”
“We’ve always been proud of you,” Mom said. “You’ve never needed the kind of support Tyler needed.”
“I never got it,” I said. “That’s different from not needing it.”
Her phone buzzed in her purse. Her eyes flickered to it before she could stop them, that reflexive check, the muscle memory of a woman who had spent two decades keeping one ear tilted toward a certain frequency.
“Who is it?” I asked.
A pause. “Tyler,” she admitted. “He needs—”
I laughed. It pulled at my stitches and I pressed my hand to my abdomen and kept laughing, sharp and helpless, because the timing was so perfectly itself that it transcended irony into something almost like clarity.
“Go,” I said.
“We’re not leaving,” Dad said. “We’re going to sit here and work through this.”
“I’m moving to Seattle,” I said.
The room went very still.
“I’ve accepted a position at a clinic there. My boss is helping me transfer. My landlord knows. The movers are scheduled. I’ve updated my bank accounts.” I looked at both of them. “This isn’t something I’ve just decided in this moment. This is something I’ve been deciding for twenty-three years, and this week I finally stopped second-guessing it.”
Mom’s face crumpled. “Seattle is so far,” she said, the words coming out like she’d never considered that distances could be features rather than obstacles.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s part of why I chose it.”
“You’ll regret this,” Dad said. “Walking away from your family. You’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I already regret every time I sat in a waiting room counting ceiling tiles while you were in the front row for Tyler. I already regret every recital you missed, every graduation dinner that turned into a Tyler update, every time I told myself next time would be different. I don’t have room for more regret. So I might as well try something new.”
They left not long after that, my mother in tears, my father muttering about gratitude and family obligation. I heard them in the corridor, their voices low and conferring, and then fading, and then gone.
Maria, who had come in on her break, stood quietly at the foot of my bed.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“Like I just set down something very heavy,” I said. “And I’m not sure yet whether my arms remember how to work without it.”
She nodded, considering this. “That feeling goes away,” she said. “Give it time.”
On discharge day she fussed over my paperwork and medications and the instructions for watching my incision, reviewed every warning sign with the thoroughness of someone who was going to be thinking about this patient long after the chart was closed. She helped me into the clothes my coworkers had brought from my apartment, elastic waist and a loose shirt that wouldn’t press on the staples.
“You have a ride?” she asked.
“My boss is driving me to Seattle.”
She looked at me for a moment, this woman who had spent a night in a plastic chair by my bed when she had no obligation to, who had wiped my face and held my hand and talked to the blood pressure cuff so I didn’t feel so alone.
“Text me when you get there,” she said.
I blinked. “You want me to?”
“I don’t stay late with just anyone,” she said. “I’d like to know how your story turns out.”
I hugged her as carefully as my stapled abdomen would allow.
Patricia was leaning against her old Subaru in the hospital drop-off lane, the backseat piled with pillows and a cooler on the floorboard. She didn’t say anything when she saw me, just opened the back door and helped me ease in, careful and unhurried, adjusting the pillow position until I signaled that it was as good as it was going to get.
“You didn’t have to come yourself,” I said.
“Of course I did,” she said. “I wasn’t about to trust one of my best surgical assistants to a rideshare.”
We drove north through the city and then out into the open stretch of highway where the buildings thinned and the sky expanded and the distance ahead became visible for the first time. We stopped every hour so I could shuffle around a rest stop parking lot, one hand on the car, the other pressed gently to my abdomen, relearning the small mechanics of being upright.
At the second stop, standing on asphalt that smelled of gasoline and heat and the particular flatness of nowhere in particular, I tilted my face up toward the pale blue sky and breathed.
“Patricia,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me for doing what your family should have done,” she said, which was so close to what Maria had said in the hospital that I wondered if this was something people who actually show up understand about themselves, that presence isn’t charity, it’s just what you do for someone who matters.
Seattle assembled itself around me over the following weeks. The apartment was small and cozy with big windows and wood floors, a kitchen that looked out over a row of trees, light coming in all morning. The first night I woke up in the dark disoriented, heart pounding, reaching for my phone on instinct to call someone, and then I remembered that the number I would have called connected to people who had never quite understood why I might need them, and I set the phone down and looked at the ceiling until my pulse slowed.
I texted Maria instead. Made it. Alive. Apartment has good light.
She responded within minutes: Proud of you. Send me pictures of any animals you adopt.
At the clinic, I started slowly. Light duties, observation, paperwork. But even from that softer angle I could feel the difference in the room. The vets asked my opinion. They explained their choices and wanted to know if I’d seen different approaches elsewhere. The technicians invited me to lunch, to coffee, to weekend hikes I couldn’t yet manage but was glad to be asked about. They remembered my name without needing a reminder. They asked about my recovery with the specific concern of people who actually wanted to know the answer.
A month in, a golden retriever named Daisy came in with gastric dilatation volvulus, a twisted stomach, the kind of emergency that mobilizes a room fast and quiet. Dr. Ng, the lead surgeon, glanced at me in the organized rush.
“How’s your stamina? Can you monitor anesthesia if you sit?”
“Yes,” I said immediately.
“Good. You’re one of the best at reading vitals I’ve seen. I want your eyes on that monitor.”
I settled onto a stool and watched Daisy’s numbers the way I had watched numbers in operating rooms for two years, but something was different. The difference was that someone had asked me to be there because they trusted what I could do, not because I was available and it was convenient.
When it was over and Daisy was stable, I stepped outside and one of the other technicians, Janet, came out and stood beside me.
“You look like you might fall over,” she said. “But you were great in there.”
“I’ll collapse in my car,” I said. “Later. In private.”
She bumped her shoulder gently against mine. “Around here we do our collapsing together,” she said. “Less distance to fall.”
I didn’t know what to do with that, so I just nodded and let it settle.
The calls from my parents started about a month after I moved. My mother’s voice on the voicemail, shaking and uncertain, asking whether I was serious about this, whether I was okay, whether I might come home for Thanksgiving. My father, stern and practical, reminding me that family was forever and that Tyler was getting interest from three different programs and the family needed to present a united front during recruiting season.
Tyler called too. A confused, slightly aggrieved message about how he didn’t know what he’d done wrong, why I’d gone quiet on social media, why things felt weird. He didn’t know I’d been in the hospital. Our parents had not told him. I found this out from my cousin weeks later, almost as a footnote in another conversation, and I turned the information over in my mind and arrived at a familiar conclusion: his ignorance had been more comfortable for them than the alternative.
I listened to all the voicemails once, sitting in my car outside the clinic, and then I deleted them.
I found a therapist. Her name was Dr. Reyes, and she had a way of sitting with a statement for several seconds before responding that initially unnerved me and eventually became one of my favorite things about her.
“You’re grieving,” she said one afternoon.
“I don’t feel like I lost anyone,” I said. “If anything, I feel like I stopped losing something.”
“You’re grieving the parents you should have had,” she said. “The ones who show up. The ones who stay. And you’re grieving the years you spent earning what should have been given freely.”
I stared at the box of tissues on the table between us.
“Is it possible to feel angry and sad and relieved at the same time?” I asked.
“Completely,” she said. “It’s messy. It’s also accurate.”
Life built itself in the ways that life does when you stop trying to arrange it around other people’s schedules. I learned which coffee shop made the kind of latte that felt like a small act of self-care rather than just caffeine. I learned the patterns of the fog over the bay in the mornings, the way the city smelled after rain, the route through the park that had the highest concentration of dogs being walked by people who would let you admire them if you asked nicely. I became “Skyler from the clinic” rather than “Tyler’s sister,” and when I mentioned my brother at all it was in careful, edited sentences, and the responses were consistently, simply: “That sounds hard,” rather than “I’m sure they meant well.”
On my one-year anniversary at the clinic, I walked into the break room and found a banner, a lopsided cake with cartoon animals drawn around the frosting edges in someone’s enthusiastic handwriting, balloons attached to the walls, one of them shaped like a dog bone for no discernible reason.
“What is this?” I asked.
Janet handed me a paper plate. “We remembered,” she said.
“Everyone remembers their first year,” another tech said. “I cried all of mine.”
“Speech,” someone called from the back.
I looked at the crooked cake. One side had collapsed slightly under the weight of the frosting, and it was the most genuinely beautiful thing I had seen in a long time.
“A year ago,” I said, slowly, “I was in a hospital bed with a breathing tube down my throat. My parents left while I had a machine breathing for me, to go to my brother’s football game. I thought that was just how things worked. That some people were always going to be the ones left behind.”
The room was quiet.
“Then a nurse sat with me for six hours because she didn’t want to leave me alone. My boss drove me halfway up the coast and made phone calls until she’d arranged a life for me here. And all of you,” I said, looking around at the faces, “showed up. Not just today. Every day. You notice when I’m tired. You cover for me when my scar is giving me trouble. You invite me to things even when you know I might have to say no.”
Someone in the back wiped their eyes.
“I used to think being the independent one was a personality trait,” I said. “Now I understand it was a coping strategy. So thank you. For making sure I don’t have to cope alone anymore.”
Janet hugged me carefully, mindful of everything, the way she had learned to be mindful of everything. “Where else would we be?” she asked, genuinely puzzled by the question.
That night, in my apartment, I was folding laundry with a foster cat performing interpretive sleep on my feet when I turned on the television for background noise and caught the tail end of a local news segment.
My parents were on screen, standing in front of the trophy case at the high school back home. My mother’s hair was perfectly arranged, my father’s arm around her shoulders. They looked exactly as they always had, comfortable and complete. The reporter was asking them about Tyler, about the scholarship offer, about what it took to raise a student athlete of his caliber.
“We’ve never missed a game,” my mother was saying, warm and proud. “Not home or away. Not once.”
The reporter leaned in: “Do you have other children?”
My mother laughed, a light, tinkling sound. “No,” she said. “We’re just blessed with Tyler.”
I sat with that for a moment.
She had told the truth. Not the way she intended it, probably, but the truth as it had always functioned in our household, the operational truth, the one that governed where people showed up and whose name was said first and who got the front row and who got the understanding blink and the empty chair. I had understood this truth at eight years old backstage at a recital, scanning the rows of folding chairs while the accompanist started to play. I had understood it at fifteen in the oral surgeon’s waiting room, and at eighteen at the kitchen table with an acceptance letter nobody asked to see. I had understood it lying in a hospital bed with a machine breathing for me, watching the elevator doors close.
I had simply, finally, decided to agree with it. To say: yes, you’re right, there is one child in this story, and it is not me, and I am going to go be in a different story.
I muted the television. The cat stretched, yawned, and relocated to my shin.
I thought about the scar on my abdomen, the faint ridge I could feel under my shirt when I pressed my fingers there, a record kept in the body of the day everything shifted. The appendix had been doing what it does when it fails, simply and catastrophically and without asking permission, and in doing so it had made a decision my conscious mind had been postponing for years. It had removed the possibility of waiting any longer. It had made the timing undeniable.
I had driven myself to the emergency room because I knew my parents would not leave practice. A surgeon had used the words “very lucky you came in when you did.” And I had been left alone with a machine and a stranger who chose to stay.
You could tell that story as a tragedy. For a long time, I had been telling it that way.
But the other version is also true: it was the rupture that cut me free. The infection that had quietly been spreading through my abdomen had a counterpart, something that had been quietly spreading through my understanding of my own life, and the surgery addressed both of them. It removed the rot and exposed the clean tissue underneath and gave everything a chance to heal correctly for once.
I picked up my phone and opened a text thread I hadn’t used in months.
Mom.
I typed three sentences. I saw the interview. I hope Tyler loves his school and his team. I’m glad you have everything you wanted.
Then one more line.
So do I.
I sent it and blocked the number again, not with anger, or not only with anger, but with the same decisiveness I brought to the operating room, where you don’t leave a wound open when you have the means to close it cleanly.
“Skyler.” Janet’s voice from the clinic doorway the next morning. “We’ve got a lab with a foreign body and an extremely guilty expression. Ready to scrub in?”
I slid my phone into my pocket, washed my hands at the sink, and pulled on my gloves.
The room smelled of antiseptic and the specific focused calm that settles over a surgical space when everyone in it knows what they’re doing and why they’re there.
“Ready,” I said.
The word had weight to it now. Not the weight of something heavy to carry but the weight of something solid to stand on, the difference between burden and foundation, between the life I had been adapting to and the one I had built with my own hands from the rubble of an emergency in a hospital room where a stranger stayed and a family left.
Ready.
For the first time in memory, the word was entirely and completely true.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.