Excerpt from Small Rain by Garth Greenwell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

There were no seats in the waiting room now, people were sitting on the floor and standing in corners, it was like an airport in bad weather. In the spring there had been stories in the news about hospitals reaching capacity, about protocols for turning people away to die, not just patients with Covid but other patients, too: people with heart attacks, crash victims, all the myriad ways people approach death, but not just them; pregnant women, too, or people with conditions that should be simple matters, like the appendicitis I might have had, all of them turned away because at a certain point the system breaks down, it was unthinkable and also it was true. In the early months of the pandemic it had been terrible in Spain, there were stories of old people being turned away, of a terrible calculus, scarce resources saved for younger patients, likelier to survive. Hijos de puta, L had shouted, streaming the Spanish news, hijos de puta, and again when Republicans here began arguing against shutdown, saying the elderly would make the sacrifice willingly, for the good of the nation, it was a patriotic duty; hijos de puta, he shouted at them through the screen, los mayores son la patria. He was thinking of his father, I knew, who had died the summer before. L had been devastated but also he knew they had been lucky, the family had been together, they had cared for his father in his final weeks, they had fed him and bathed him, they had been together when he died. A year later and he would have died alone. A la cárcel, he said, about the politicians and the doctors, too, though the doctors didn't have a choice, I thought. About the politicians I agreed, I wanted to see them all in prison, every last one, but what choice did the doctors have, they weren't politicians, they couldn't bluff or bully their way through, they were slammed against the rock of reality, and when all choices are unacceptable one still has to choose. In the spring that hadn't happened here, it hadn't been like New York or Seattle, even with cases flown in from across the state they had never filled all the rooms. But now it had come, I thought, perched in the well of a window in the waiting room, and it was still only August, in the winter it would be worse. I couldn't imagine more people fitting into the ER, already people were disregarding the signs placed on seats. A tall thin man was trying to clean the floor, riding some kind of motorized vehicle that swept and mopped, but it was useless, he couldn't find a path through, even as he repeatedly said Excuse me, too loudly, either in frustration or because of the earbuds he wore. The sound he made competed with a woman's moans, a woman in a wheelchair not far from where I had been sitting earlier; at first they seemed like wordless moans but in fact she was saying I can't, repeating it again and again, the words drawn out and broken by sobs. I had thought she was an old woman but glancing again I saw she wasn't, she was in her midthirties maybe, and pregnant; I hadn't noticed her belly at first because she was hunched forward in the chair. She wasn't alone, a man was with her, she must have gotten special dispensation; a young man I thought, his face was young though he was nearly bald already, maybe that was why at first glance I had thought that they were old. He was holding one of her hands in both of his, or trying to; she kept twisting her hand free and he kept taking it again, stroking it, letting go only long enough to push her hair out of her face. She was obviously in distress, in pain, but no one came, she wasn't triaged out. She had to wait like everyone else.

Excerpted from Small Rain by Garth Greenwell. Copyright © 2024 by Garth Greenwell. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.