Perks Of The Job

Inspired by TN Kerr’s prompts which are
shown below. I chose to allude to the
prompts and not use them as written.
Here’s where the inspiration took me.

The fluorescent lights in the imaging department buzzed like trapped flies. Walker had been shuffling through those antiseptic corridors for nine months now, pushing patients in wheelchairs, fetching charts, pretending the lead-lined walls didn’t feel like a tomb.

But the paycheck was real. First time in two years he’d been able to stash anything away …. a few bills folded into an envelope under his mattress, growing thicker each Friday. Not much, but enough to think about getting out. Enough to make him feel almost human again.

Then the vertigo hit.

It started subtle …. just the room tilting when he stood up too fast, the floor refusing to stay level. Within days, he couldn’t tell if he was standing or falling. His stomach churned like he’d been spinning in circles for hours. Sweat cold on his skin. Headaches, vision changes, occasional slurred speech. The world turned to soup, thick and wrong.

Even before the tests came back, he knew this was the beginning of something far more serious than vertigo. You don’t spend that much time around X-ray machines, even low-dose ones, without learning the symptoms. The envelope under his mattress suddenly felt very thin. Very pointless.

The twisted part? He kept showing up. Kept pushing those wheelchairs. Because sick or not, dizzy or not, that money was the only thing keeping him from disappearing completely.

NAR©2026

The prompts: 1. walk in radiology; 2. got a job and started putting money away; and 3. sick, dizzy and disoriented.

This is “Round and Round and Round” by Buffalo Springfield

OLWG# 412- Diamond Tease Cabaret

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