Jane Churchon
Jane Churchon lives in Sacramento, California, where she works as a nursing supervisor, though lately she’s been hankering for ramen noodles and peanut butter and is considering going to graduate school to ensure a steady diet of them. Her work has appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review and American River Review.
— From February 2009The Dead Book
I like to take my time when I pronounce someone dead. The bare-minimum requirement is one minute with a stethoscope pressed to someone’s chest, listening for a sound that is not there; with my fingers bearing down on the side of someone’s neck, feeling for an absent pulse; with a flashlight beamed into someone’s fixed and dilated pupils, waiting for the constriction that will not come.
February 2009Room 3206
Mr. K. was forty-two and almost dead, kept alive by machines, tubes, and liquids that would at best give him two or three days more. His wife had brought him to the emergency room, probably because he was confused or vomiting or had chest pain. It soon became clear that he had taken too much Vicodin or heroin or any one of a number of potentially lethal drugs, perhaps by accident, perhaps not.
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