Fiction
Sexy Tiger
By Patrick McGinty
I spent a summer temping at a hospice facility, where the phone calls to reception were easy enough to handle. The cafeteria staff usually called to see if all twelve lunch trays would still be needed on the eighth floor. Hospice nurses—i.e. humanity’s greatest self-advertisement—would phone me on their off days, just to check in. Doctors from the lower floors of the hospital badgered me about availability, not because anyone was near the end, but because someone was complaining endlessly about their roommate and had heard that the rooms up on hospice were a real score—private, secure, quiet. The funeral directors claimed they wanted my help, but what they really wanted was an audience—could I help them wrangle the gurney through the basement exit to the rear parking lot? Did I have any idea how bad the gas mileage is on a hearse? And on these hills? Who the hell thought it’d be a good idea to build a hospital on a slope like this? Do you know what happens when you drive one of these Long Johns through Appalachia and you forget to strap the body tight?
But the intercom: the intercom was the real job. Each patient, upon their intake, password-protected their room. A visitor could not transition from the elevators onto the long hallway of the eighth floor without clicking a button and telling me their relation’s name and passcode. Some passwords sounded like aquatic characters from children’s books: Angel, Pearl, Starfish. One in four could pass as a throwback pet name: Benji, Bandit, once a MewMew. On the right week, the codes on my clipboard were a decent snapshot of the (mostly white, insured) 20th century: Elvis, Easy Rider, Santa, even—
“I won’t say it,” a woman told me through the intercom, her sister newly admitted.
“I can accept the proper form,” I said. “Of the first…part.”
A pause, then: “Richard Nixon.”
Was the patient a fan? Was her last good joke making her family say dick to a temp receptionist? It was quite easy to spend huge chunks of a 7-to-7 hospice shift interpreting and re-interpreting this pile of Rosebuds, from the outright snarky, to the pet names, to the different sort of pet names (I inhale a bit painfully every time I think of two male passwords: Peach and Doll). Because the passwords were unsearchable, codified only on my clipboard at reception, they became imbued with a power that had more to do with scarcity than meaning. Many families organized around this power, spreading their password like a cause. “Just got the code this morning,” one visitor told me, his flowers baton-like. Others protected their commodity fiercely; grief, like bodies, can get messy, and some prefer a clean house (or at least privacy while cleaning). Some treated the codes like currency.
“Is there someone you can call for the password?” I asked.
I did not need the intercom to hear the woman at the elevators. “They’re all in that room. Aren’t they.”
I caved too quickly, saying I could check with them.
“Oh please, they’ll never give it to me,” she said. “Just make sure they know I drove an hour.”
That daughter or niece never got in to see the woman who made her password Sexy Tiger; she didn’t survive the night. The funeral director parked uphill and far off in the staff lot, and by the time I’d helped him shove the gurney in the hearse, the emergency hospital door had swung downhill, locked. It was July, pushing one-hundred. On the long walk to the front entrance I started (and haven’t stopped) thinking about whether my password would be honorific or funny, absurdist or romantic. It would be some dog whose grandparents were not yet born. The type of tree on my Appalachian hill where watch water ride in from the coast. The extrovert in me wanted every name I’d ever known to know the password, get tattoos of it; the writer has only ever wanted a good table. The air conditioning in the lobby disappeared my sweat, and the voicemail was of course full—two more inquiries about a bed. A nurse saying she could come in overnight. Someone had died in the ambulance on the way over, or on the way into it, I can’t remember, and I never followed up. There were always more calls than beds, far more beeps on the main line than secrets whispered through the intercom, yet my loving if nosy scroll of passwords I kept from that summer obscures this noisy reality, peddling a neat myth that we all receive one final act of dedication and protection.
Patrick McGinty
Patrick McGinty teaches first-year writing and creative writing as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures, and Writing at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. His debut novel about Pittsburgh’s driverless car sector, Test Drive, received coverage in outlets like Buzzfeed and The New Yorker, and his longform tech criticism and short fiction have appeared in outlets like The Baffler, The New Inquiry, ZYZZYVA, Jacobin, DIAGRAM, and The Cleveland Review of Books. In 2023 he was a participant at the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Rust Belt Humanities Lab, and his second novel, Town College City Road, was published by The University of Wisconsin Press in Fall 2025.