The Last Handoff
Standalone · Near-future literary fiction / speculative fiction
Two overnight shifts. One veteran nurse. It’s not dystopian. It’s inevitable.
Available on Amazon
Ray Garrison has worked the night shift on a long-term care floor for thirty-two years. He knows every patient’s body the way he knows his own: the pressure points, the turning schedules, the small signs that separate a good night from a bad one. He knows Artie, ventilator-dependent for fourteen months, well enough to read a joke in the shape of his mouth before he finishes forming it.
He also knows the Cast units, the humanoid machines that are inheriting more of the floor with each passing month. They don’t get tired. They don’t make mistakes. They don’t need him to explain anything twice.
Over two overnight shifts, Garrison keeps doing the job the way he always has: turning patients, calming the frightened ones, catching the small things a monitor doesn’t flag.
The Last Handoff is not a story about machines turning against the people they’re built to serve. Nothing malfunctions. Nobody is cruel. There’s no villain to blame and no crisis to fight, only a good nurse doing everything right, one shift at a time, while the floor changes around him.
A near-future story grounded in real nursing shortages and demographic trends.
