But We Can Fix It!

Based on true events.

The Stench

They say I’m mad. That’s what they whisper when they think I’m asleep. Mad, broken, unwell.

But listen—please—listen to me. I remember every detail. My mind is clear. I am not mad.

It began with the stench.

Not the gentle rot of time or sickness, but something else. Something that crawled up through the floorboards of the lying-in ward in Vienna and made its nest behind my eyes. You cannot smell that kind of death unless you’ve lived inside it.

Do you understand? Do you know what it’s like to walk into a room and know, with certainty, that someone in it will not live to see the morning?

I did. Every day.

They came to us pink-cheeked, scared, but alive. I held their hands. I smiled when they told me the names they’d chosen—Magdalena, Johann, little Katalin. And then, one by one, they died. In agony. In fever. In blood so dark it looked like ink.

They screamed, and I couldn’t stop it.

No—wait. That’s not true. I did stop it.

Eventually.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

You must see it as I saw it. Two wards—one run by midwives, one by doctors and students. The same beds, the same walls, the same linens. And yet—twice the deaths in our clinic. Always ours. Always after the student had come from the autopsy room. Always after the cold snap of steel instruments from the dead to the living.

They didn’t wash. Not properly. Not with any thought to consequence. I didn’t either—not then. We rinsed. We wiped. We believed ourselves immune.

Then Kolletschka died. Jakob. A friend. Cut during an autopsy. He died like the mothers did—fevered, swollen, leaking life from every hole.

And then it came to me. All of it. Like lightning. Like God.

It was us.

We were carrying death on our hands.

I began to wash. Not a rinse. Not a dab. A purge. Chlorinated lime. The stuff burned. My knuckles bled. But I didn’t care.

I made the students do it. The orderlies. Anyone who touched a woman in labor—washed.

And the deaths stopped. I wrote it down. Charted the numbers. Fifteen percent, twelve, eight—two. I thought—I truly thought—they would rejoice.

But they didn’t.

They frowned. They scoffed. They called it coincidence. They said I was unstable. Fixated.

I am not unstable. I am observant.

They are the ones who cannot see.