The Copy Machine.
The Doctor sits patiently, hammering away with his pencil at a  diagnostic sheet. The patient sits with his legs awkwardly crossed. The room is silent for a moment.
	The Doctor looks up. “Sex Life?”
	“Well it’s um, I’m sorry what did you ask me?”
	“Your sex life? How is your sex life?”
	“Medically?”
	The doctor laughed, “No, in a personal sense.”
	“None. Nada. Zero.”
	“Do you feel that’s healthy?”
	“Probably not, but I’ve never studied medicine”
	There is no laughter. The Doctor tensely stares at the patient and then breaks away. He taps his pencil, now, looking at his watch.
	“I’m going to get those blood work results. The nurse will be in to swab you in a moment.”
	“Swab me?”
	“Yes. Your throat is going to be swabbed for anything to do with strep. It’s a seasonal thing.”
	The doctor exits, leaving the patient alone to stare at his hands. He looks at an issue of Scientific American shimmering in the fluorescent glow. The Patient contemplates time. Meanwhile, the Doctor remains driven.
	“Amanda,” the doctor says into the main lobby office.
	“Yes,” Amanda shoots back, her cool blonde face shining with skin products.
	“I need to talk with you about this patient.”
	“Okay?” She squeezes her face, vexed, but remains cool.
	Amanda exits cooly, out of the Lobby Office, and into the inner office of the practice. She discards her sweater on the back of a rolling chair, and her eyes make contact with the Doctor’s.
	“Read,” he gestures to his clipboard.
	She smiles, and brushes up against the thin sides of his polyester scrubs to examine the clipboard. She smiles at the typed column: “Sex Life,” black, Times New Roman. She looks down to the adjacent scribble. She says the phrase corresponding to the words: “N/A,” and breaks into laughter.
	“Good God,” she says while containing her laughs with the palms of her hands.
	“The Copyroom is calling us.”
	“Yes,” she said, “we need to make as many copies of this as possible.”
	They shuffle madly to the copy room. Once inside, the doctor closes the shades.
	“Wait.” The Doctor puts his arm up, “We need to make copies of this.”
	“Why?”
	“Just trust me. These walls are paper thin.”
	The Patient is consumed by an article on Climate Change. He hears a ritualistic thumping on the wall. He thinks nothing of it, until it stopped. A few moments passed. He stared at the adjacent wall, on alert for any noise that would clarify the silence. Commentary on the wall paint silenced his curious mind, and then, an absolutely unthinkable thing happened. The nurse opened the door, smiling with her white teeth obscured by her red wet lips. Behind her was a wave of noise that sounded like machinery. She greeted him and he greeted her back almost inaudibly. There was extreme tension in his voice, and almost none inside of the nurse.
	“It’s bad, our meeting with this cotton swab.”
	“Oh, why yeah, yeah.” he said (this was the almost inaudible remark).
	“This page tried our eyes, for a while we did laugh” she pointed with a cotton swab to the clipboard.
He muttered something under his breath.
	“Hope I won’t be too crass to ask, but I mean to see to it that we get this throat
checked. These checks reveal no feel in the sensitive throat”
	He smiled to himself and said nothing. It was only at this point did he realize what he had muttered: “My Sex Life.”
	She began to speak, and he began to nod. He was lost in the pure sound of her voice. They seemed to him as vibrations, brilliant arcs of sound that, at their core, were warm and sensual. He felt especially stimulated at the fact that she spoke each sentence in the same way, as if it were in some sort of verse. She always stretched the last syllable into a slight groan that sounded as if she was asking a question.
 He stared at her nametag and up at her eyes, and then back down to her breast. His head was in a state of the same calm that often lulls children to sleep. But soon, the restlessness came back.
	“...and what about you?” She was smiling, asking him a question.
	“Well...I think that I...Uh...” he was taken over by the same nervous grip that shouldn’t come to adults of his age.
	“Can we both just see to it that no one knows about it?”
	“What?”
	“The copy machine is failing in there. I think we fucked it up. I’m probably going to lose my job just because that bastard couldn’t get it up.”
	“Copy machines tend to be a hassle. Ink prices, man”
	“What the fuck? I just opened up to you and all you can come back with is some witty elevator talk.”
	“I’m sorry I just didn’t understand this situation.”
	“How could you not understand me? I said it loud and clear and you just looked at my tits.”
	“I’m sorry! Jesus I’ve only known you for two minutes and you’re nagging me like we’re a married couple!”
	There was a strange silence, again. The walls in the place seemed suited to soundlessness. He laughed nervously and began to tap his index finger on his left leg. He realized he began to shake. A stream of urine ran down his leg.
	“So...Sex life? Any STD’s.”
	“Oh. What?” He crossed his legs uncomfortably.
	She looked at him. “I want you to look me in the eyes when you talk to me.”
	“What? Jesus, good God…” he was still pissing.
	“You heard me.”
	“Oh no. Oh no. Oh good God no.”
	She pried his leg off of its opposite and saw the small puddle he was sitting in. The Patient’s heart seemed to explode and everything for him turned into a cold, dizzy darkness.
	Amanda stood up, and walked out of the room. She double locked the door and shook her head. In three years of working as an RN she has never seen a mess so total and absolutely vile as the one that sat in that room.
The copy machine roared.