‘ Spiky Leaf Seed ‘    Scanned and color altered plants at high resolution by Bob Bauer.

The Price of Sugar

by reddit user Cymoril_Melnibone

When I was a little girl, if you’d asked me what I wanted to be, ‘starving artist’ wouldn’t have even been on the list.

Most likely I would have told you ‘a dinosaur’ or ‘an astronaut’ – and later, when I realised that children couldn’t become dinosaurs and brown girls from New Zealand couldn’t become astronauts, I would have said ‘a teacher’ or ‘a nurse’. At school I got progressively worse at every subject but English and Art, but in my teens my aunty got me a part-time job as a cleaner at the local hospital. I thought at the time that the money wasn’t too awful, and I was good at it. I enjoyed cleaning; even if sometimes what I was cleaning was explosive diarrhoea or blood-laced vomit.

After a while you got used to most of the smells. Well, except for Clostridium difficile – otherwise known as ‘C. Diff’. But thankfully I rarely had to clean up after one of those patients.

The perfect cabin for a drizzly October day in Washington.