Deadly Words

In silence she stalks the day-glo corridors and brightly lit wards,
her trolley laden with fiction and disease. Wide her smile is and
frail her body as she betrays none of the deadly menace she will
pass from bed to bed. 'Here my dear,' she sweetly intones, 'try the
new agatha christie. It's a real pager turner...' her sinister laughter
evades our ever-weakened senses as she wheels her squeaky
payload towards another poor premedicated fool.

Hospital staff take utmost care to avoid the spreading of infections, doctors and nurses cleanse their hands with alcohol for each bed they visit, every area has been left sterilised, cleansed and hygenic... except the hospital library and its patron. Oh yes, this little old dear never washes a thing, her cloudy grey hair buzzes with flies as she dons the apron of negligence and wheels her bookcart of death from floor to floor. Look, I have a problem even going to a regular library. Shelf upon shelf of dirty yellowed dry-thumbed plastic-covered paperbacks, germ magnets the lot of them, breeding and cultivating hordes of snot, spit and filth spread by thick mucky fingers. But hospital libraries?! That's something else... At least in a regular library you don't actually know where the books have been, but a hospital library?- they've been with sick people! Thousands and thousands of deathly sick people all holding these tomes in their clammy sweaty hands, raining down spitlets of spit with their racking hacking coughs. Uch. Sometimes the book is so crispy you can almost smell the vomit. But maybe that's how they get rid of annoying patients; 'bed 14's shouting again, send up the book-lady'. It can only be responsible for the current spread of drug-resistant superbugs, all those little germs clinging to the curtains just waiting for their opportunity, 'here comes the book-lady guys! Jump on!'