Chinese character symbols flash sheet

See that sheet over the sink? Sister Pryce pinned it up the winter of the big flu. She'd brought it back from a shop in London, a grid of brush-marks with a little English word under each one, like a child's reading book. She said the charts were all numbers and the sheet was all hope, and she'd read one out loud to whoever sat with a patient that night.

Mr Dunmore in bed four had been a joiner for forty years and never once sat still. In his last week he wanted nothing but that sheet. He asked her to read the bottom row. She tapped the label under the one that looked like a sun coming up behind a gate. Sunrise, she said. He nodded as if it answered a question he'd been putting to the ceiling for days, and said he'd take that one, thanks, he'd been up for every other kind.

He went just as the light came through the blinds, the first bar of it falling across the sheet and catching the ink so the word looked wet. I mopped round his bed and left the blinds up, because he'd asked me to. I still can't tell you whether that's what he meant, but I've never once pulled them down since.