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The prompt

The last chart note

A hospice nurse finishing a Tuesday overnight shift sits down to write her final chart note before the day shift arrives, and almost writes something she's never told a family before. Write the moment before she decides.

Stay close to the physical — the pen, the fluorescent light over the nurses' station, the exact words she almost writes. You don't need to reveal what she almost said if the restraint is more interesting than the reveal.

75–500 words

Anonymous

The pen hovers over the line marked ADDITIONAL NOTES longer than it should. Fluorescent light does nothing kind to a room at 6 a.m. She has already written vitals, meds, time of death. What she hasn't written is that his daughter held his hand through the whole thing and never once looked away — and that this is the kind of thing families ask her later, do you think he heard me, and she always says yes because it costs nothing and might be true. She writes 'family present throughout' instead, caps the pen, goes to change out of scrubs that still smell like the room.

Anonymous

I always want to write more in the notes than they let you write. Like tonight, the guy's wife stayed the whole night in the chair, didn't sleep, just watched him breathe until he stopped. I wanted to put that in the chart somehow but there's no box for it. So I just wrote what you're supposed to write. Then I sat there another minute before I clocked out because it felt wrong to just move on to the next thing.

Anonymous

Pen down. Line blank. She'd told three families this year: he heard you, at the end. True twice. She didn't know about the third. Wrote the vitals. Signed her name. Went home.

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