it's benign

The eggshell corridor was at least a hundred yards long
black-splatter-on-beige linoleum tile floor and
plain oak-finished doors every 20 feet on either side.

Each stop clapped with clinical reverberation;
a sense of foreboding -- when the door opens, everything
will change.

A nurse in bright blue and red floral scrubs stepped out
from a door 100 feet down to my right.  She walked toward me
with short brisk steps, glanced at me
smiled a tight professional smile and kept on.

other than her steps, my steps, and the hollow  twang
of nearly an echo, it was dangerously void of noise
and hope. The sense of something though, that was
loud in my gut.

The horizontal vertigo twisted my innards like licorice
as i finally made my way to the door to his wood-panelled
anti-septic smelling office on the end.

"Anstey," i said.
"He'll be right with you," the sixty-something-year-old fat
wrinkled angry hopeless cruel and otherwise inhuman nurse
told me, before I waited an hour.