Her name is Claire, but the uniform, the teeth, the eyes, the hips – none of them scream 'Claire'. I've never met a nurse named Claire. I've met strippers and murderers and mean little girls named Claire, but never a nurse, and never a nurse quite like her. But new experiences are everywhere, and times definitely change.

Like when the old world finally went black – that was the tell-tale sign that everything I'd ever known was going to change.

The world used to be a beautiful shade of green against blue, right? I'm not entirely sure, but I've read as such in the old history books – the ones that you have to really dig past cobwebs for. I read them last year, and they were amazing. The world was blue-green, and there were fuzzy animals that nibbled on plants, and there was a great amount of creative music, and people who actually made music for a living called 'musicians', and there was hot water and there was Mick Donald's. But that was before the world went gray, and long before the world went black.

They don't send us messages from the old world anymore. I'm glad. I only read one – Claire let me read it because she caught me reading the history books and realized that I could read very well – and the letter made me depressed and angry and unsure. Well… actually, no. That isn't entirely true. I wasn't depressed, or at least I don't think I was. I wasn't depressed because Claire told me so, because she analyzed me and told me that I was merely seeing the universe as God sees the universe, without fluff or padding. That didn't make sense to me until I noticed that my pillow was made out of fluff, and the bed beneath it was cold and hard and painful. That must be what she meant. After I read that one letter, I was able to see the universe for the cold, hard and painful place that it is, has been, and forever will be.

That was after reading only one letter. Claire read them all.

I've never met a nurse quite like her.

In the hospital, there used to be two nurses – Claire and Gabrielle. I used to spend my days chatting with Gabrielle, learning from her. She was an ancient woman who performed powerful witchcraft when she was a child. She first contacted the dark side when she was only nineteen – my age! – and the spirits whirled around her and whispered the secrets of the Gods to her, and she screamed and sobbed and became very sick because the spirits' voices were crafted from razorblades and laced with poison. Gabrielle told me that after she heard the spirits' secrets, she lay in bed for ten decades and stared at their ghostly visages that were burned into her retinas; she listened to their screams, which were stabbed into her eardrums; she tasted their frozen blood, which had been splattered against her tongue. She lay there and consumed their beings and became them. And I asked Gabrielle if she ever woke up from her hundred-year nightmare (because the history books told me a decade is ten), and she prodded my soft stomach playfully, muttering that if she hadn't, she wouldn't be here telling me about it. I laughed at my own stupidity, for there was nothing else to do.

Claire told me that Gabrielle does not exist. Even when Gabrielle is sitting right next to her, breathing in her ear, whispering the secrets of the Gods… Claire tells me that Gabrielle doesn't exist. Claire tells me that I'm not stupid for believing in imaginary things, just confused and sick. And I agree with her – I am very, very sick. But even so, when Claire turns the lights off in my room and leaves me alone, I cry at my own stupidity.

Gabrielle took offense at Claire's hurtful comments, and stopped coming into my room to talk. I was a bit downtrodden for a few weeks, as one might imagine. I then awoke one morning to realize that Gabrielle had snuck into my room during the night and quietly slit her wrists. Her smiling, pasty old corpse lay in the middle of a scarlet puddle, sort of like a cracker in tomato soup, or a potato-skin lost in ketchup. Or a body decomposing in blood.

So now there is only one nurse – Claire.

She doesn't really look like a Claire. When I'm lonely, I try to come up with different names for her – I started doing this ten years ago, a decade ago, and if I'd actually written down every name I came up with, I'd have an impressively lengthy list on an impressively long piece of paper. I came up with beautiful names at first, but then I realized that Claire had beautiful name, and that it didn't suit her. So I started fresh and replaced the beautiful names with ones that made me stumble when I tried to pronounce them. I remembered all the ugly names I'd ever heard of, and then I began to make them up on my own. But none of them really suited Claire. Perhaps she wasn't worthy of a name at all.

My room is nice enough. Claire once told me that if I acted a certain way, and took all my medication, and kept myself plugged into the wall long enough, she would make sure that I would get a window with a spectacular view. She promised me that in private, with her dry-ice fingers burning into my cheek. I did what I was told. I have a room with a window now, and the view is worse than my most jaded nightmares.

The creatures haven't murdered anybody in ten years – or at least that's what Claire told me. I can look outside and see them crawling around outside, kicking up rust-red sand, mulling about like rhythmless rabbits – something that was fuzzy and long-eared and vegan and sexually eager, according to the history books – but they didn't look like rabbits at all; their skin was scaly and their paws were pointy and thin, and their teeth were nowhere near as adorable. But they mulled about like rabbits. They mulled about and nuzzled the dry rust soil and waited for something to come along so that they may feed again.

But it had been ten years after all. Perhaps they had forgotten how to feed.

But even without those ghastly not-rabbits outside my window, I don't particularly like this place. The history books call it Mars, but it doesn't have a name anymore. Not after the old world went black. Hell, not even after the world went gray. Most big, official things do not have names anymore. The hospital is called 'hospital' and the medicine is called 'medicine' and the place called Earth is called the 'old world' and the place called Mars is just called 'home' – whatever that means. Even though I can read well, there are still some ancient words that I do not entirely know. Like 'home'. Claire did not ever tell me what 'home' meant when I asked her. She simply pointed outside to the terrible creatures, pursed her lips, dragged her icy fingers against me and left me alone.

I look outside my window and I see things other than the nightmare rabbits. There are metal spires in the distance that are chipped and creaking and desolate. They pierce the glowing orange sky and glint in the sunlight and they look very ugly, almost as ugly as some of the names on my mental list. They are a depressing memory of a distant world that used to be so prominent and dominating and blue and green. Sometimes I feel inspired by them, sometimes enslaved. Claire tells me that they are just old monuments to old Gods that everybody has forgotten. I asked her if they were the same Gods that whispered secrets to Gabrielle, but she didn't say. I don't think she could. I don't think she knew.

Sometimes I will say things to Claire that she cannot answer, or that she tries to answer but fails to do so properly. I once asked her where I came from. She told me that I came from the old world, but the history books say that this is impossible. I am almost two decades old, and the world has not been blue for at least eight. Claire lies to me sometimes, and I am not entirely sure why.

But it's okay. She's special in a way that only nurses named Claire can be.

And I've planned something marvelous for her. A special surprise.

I cannot leave my room without unplugging myself, because when I unplug myself the alarm goes off – it makes a terrifying screeching noise – and when the alarm goes off, Claire becomes violent towards me. She uses her gentle fingers to torture me and she makes me sob so passionately that I'll crawl back into bed and plug myself back in, without any argument. But she does none of this in anger; she merely does it for my own protection. But I've found a way around it. It will take me the better part of a decade to pull it off, but I've found a way around it.

But until that time comes, I will have to sit here and wait. Watch the nightmare rabbits and twiddle my thumbs and wait. Sip tomato soup and nibble potato skins and wait. Compile an invisible list of names and daydream about musicians eating Mick Donald's and wait.

Today, the sky is a more brilliant red than it has ever been before. I rise from my bed – making sure to keep myself plugged in – and tiptoe over to the window to watch the sun. Gabrielle's coagulated old blood sticks to the soles of my feet and gums up the space between my toes, but I ignore it. I've gotten used to it by now. It's become a little carpet on the icy metallic floor. A welcome change.

The red horizon bathes me in a murderous light, more so than usual. And I like it. I like the way it makes me look in the window's shallow reflection. It makes me feel intelligent and powerful and free – not spindly and hairless and plugged into a hospital bed on a twenty-foot cord. Not rotting away. Not living with the slaughtered corpse of a figment of my imagination. I close my eyes and bathe in the fires of the gore-slick sun. And I fly, for decades upon decades.