Unfinished: The Sketch

The crazed convulsions reached their peak, the patient straining at his bonds, then suddenly were ended. Comatose, barely breathing, he lay. I grabbed his wrist. His pulse was weak. I kept my finger pressed into the vein, my eye on the clock, counting the beats of his heart.

“Cover it up,” I say after a moment, and a curtain was pulled over the strange sketch. “That, ladies and gentlemen,” they begin rolling the weird image away, “is one of three typical responses. Certainly, it is the most flamboyant. Our patient here has reliably reacted the same way to every exposer.”