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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/chancemesenpai on 2026-08-09 23:00:46+00:00.

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The oilfield wasn’t my first job. I’d been an EMT for a couple years after high school. That had its own scares, especially at the beginning. When you’re new it feels like you’re never going to catch up. But then you settle into a rhythm. The sky isn’t always falling, just most of the time. The easy times remind you that the hard times pass.

And there are laughs. Most of the calls we got were for something totally useless. One of my favorites was this mid-forties loser. Real boy who cried wolf situation. The guy loved football, watched every Sunday, all day long. Probably he was addicted to sportsbetting or something. I don’t know for sure about that part, but it seems right for a loser such as himself. Anyway, every Sunday this guy would crush a six pack of beer, maybe more. Then, when the indigestion set in, he would tell his wife he was having a heart attack. We got called to that house four or five times at least while I was on the job. The guy’s wife was actually really nice. I guess when all you’ve got is the loser, you’re still going to worry about him.

I couldn’t laugh off every call, though. Probably once a week (once a shift around the holidays) there would be someone really dead or really dying. It’s not an easy thing to see, especially the first few times. It’s actually a lot better when you get there and the body’s already a body. As opposed to, you know, a living breathing human being who becomes a body on your watch. When they’re already dead, there’s no “oh, maybe I should’ve done something differently.” Doesn’t feel like it’s your fault.

From time to time, we’d get called to this one particular nursing home on the west side of town. A real shithole – you walk in and everything’s yellow. The floors, the walls, the lights. All yellow. You could tell it all used to be white, but that’s the way things go with age. Maybe I’m exaggerating the whole general vibe, too. Like I have a scary-movie image of the place in my mind because of what happened there. But like I said, real shithole.

Most nursing home deaths are expected, or at least not-too-unexpected, and they just call a hearse instead of a whole ambulance. But every once in a while, there’s some poor bastard whose kids weren’t ready to let go. If you ask me, it’s something wrong with the relationship. “Daddy issues” or whatever you want to call it. Can’t make daddy DNR, cause what if he dies? How am I going to fix things with him then? Anyway, they never fix things and then dad dies and now it’s my problem.

I’m complaining a lot, but CPR isn’t pretty. You don’t really get it in the training, with the rubber dummy who has no limbs and an open mouth. You really learn the first time you do it. And someone yells at you that those aren’t good compressions. Then, you lock your elbows and really start pushing, and you hear the bones cracking. Feel them cracking, too.

So one of the first times we get called to the place, it’s for this old fella. Real old, late nineties. His nurse had called 9-1-1 thinking he was having a stroke. Face wasn’t droopy or anything like that, but she told the operator he had an “altered mental status.” At his age, that was enough. We made decent time, twelve minutes between the call and arriving on the scene.

When we roll into the guy’s room, the nurse is panicking. Telling us how he’s normally super sharp, but today’s different. I remember thinking she must’ve been new. Normally, the staff at these places are pretty level-headed. “Desensitized” and all. A confused old man shouldn’t be all that shocking. But she was pretty young. Same age as me or a couple years older maybe. Nice looking girl, too.

Anyway, we walk in the room and she’s crying and talking real fast. I walk over to take a look at the guy while she’s giving us the details. She came to check on him a half hour ago and he wasn’t himself. Slurred speech. Confused. Kept saying he was sorry. “He didn’t mean to.” By the time I get to bedside he’s not talking at all. Eyes closed. I ask him, “sir, can you open your eyes for me?”

Nothing. I think maybe he’s hard of hearing, so I say it a little louder, wave a hand over his face. “Sir, can you open your eyes for me?”

He’s not moving. The hair starts to stand up on the back of my neck. As I reach toward his neck with my first and second fingers, I interrupt the nurse, “what’s his code status?”

She stops talking for a second, sniffs, still crying. Asks, “what?” I don’t think she realized yet what was happening, or how much worse it was going to get.

“What is his code status?”

That’s when she figures it out. She stops crying, goes real serious. Straightens her back and all. “He’s full code. We’ve talked to the family about it but . . .”

I’m not listening. My fingers are on his carotid artery. Nothing. In your average near-centenarian, this wouldn’t be a big deal. A 90-something in a nursing home. He should be DNR/DNI. Do not resuscitate, do not intubate. But like I said, some kids are never ready. Now we have an obligation to do everything we can.

This was the worst part of the job. Sometimes, when I’m in a mood to complain, I’ll say otherwise. It was “abuse of the system” or something like that. Maybe it was the ODs. Those were pretty bleak. But no, nothing could hold a fucking candle to the real worst part of the job: torturing some old bastard in his final moments because his kids weren’t ready to let go.

I could tell this was going to be a bad one. The old man’s skin was paper thin, translucent. I set my hands on his chest, fighting against my hesitation. My instinct to be delicate with my movements. Like he was a baby bird I was holding in my two hands.

His chest collapsed with the first compression. No resistance at all as my hands sank down, down, like his ribs were going to touch his spine. I couldn’t fathom how his heart and lungs were still intact. Surely they’d been reduced to jelly under my hands and his collapsed sternum.

And the sound. My god. A lot of the time, the sound was rough when you were doing compressions on a patient this old. Like you were crushing a bag of chips under the heel of your hand. This was worse. Like a baby bird I was crushing between my two hands. Squish.

Then he groaned.

I looked up from my hands, and his eyes were wide open. Ice-blue and sinking into his skull. He looked at me with something like pleading. To let him die, grant him the peaceful death his children had denied him. But the longer I looked, the more I recognized something else. He wasn’t pleading with me. He was apologizing.

His eyes begging for my forgiveness, the old bastard opened his mouth and spoke to me.

“It’s yours now.”

The old man let out a long, slow breath. Smoke poured out of his mouth. Thick, black smoke that spread like an avalanche down his chest. But when it reached my hands, still one over the other on his sternum, I could feel that it wasn’t smoke. It was something like smoke, hot and fluid, but alive.

Tendrils of it reached up and encircled my wrists, burning me as it traveled up my arms until I couldn’t see my arms anymore. I couldn’t see anything but the thick, black cloud covering me and the old man alike. And then I started to feel its grip. It had settled around my chest and arms, squeezing me like an enormous snake eager to hear my heartbeat slow and stop before it consumed me.

My eyes darted around the room, desperate. I couldn’t tell if the living smoke had covered my eyes or everything else, but I couldn’t see anything. Total darkness. My eyes filled with tears as my ribs struggled against the cloud constricting them. My chin angled upward as my open mouth begged for air.

Suddenly, it let me go. But there was no air to be had. I inhaled deeply, and the living smoke filled my lungs, scalding them. Tears streamed down my face as my gut tightened, my diaphragm fighting for a cough. But there would be no coughing – only more smoke. And when my lungs were full, the smoke continued, cascading into my mouth with a force like it intended to fill my body from head to toe.

Until the smoke was gone. And there I was, my hands still one on top of the other on the old man’s chest, which was worse for wear, potato-chip crunching with each compression, but certainly not caved-in the way it had been a moment ago. The paramedic, holding his arms out and standing across the bed from me, shouted “SWITCH” and started his 200 compressions as I backed away.

I watched the old man’s face the whole time. He didn’t open his eyes. Didn’t speak. Didn’t breathe – in or out. Never got a pulse back. At the end of the paramedic’s 200 compressions, I reached back toward the man’s chest to start my next round, but the paramedic caught my hands in the air, stopping me.

“No, we’re calling it.” The paramedic shook his head. Normally we’d keep going, switching every 200 compressions for a half hour or so. Apparently with a patient that old and frail, you still have to try CPR, but they don’t need the whole dog and pony show. The paramedic left the room to call the Medical Examiner.

Alone in silence with the man’s body, my mind raced. My body was pulsing, hot and dense like I carried something heavy inside of me. Like there was another man the same shape and size as me, coextensive with my own body but made of the living smoke. That sounds fucking crazy, of course, so my first instinct was to keep it to myself.  But when the paramedic walked back into the ...

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