Notes from the Late Shift

Notes from the Late Shift: The Quiet That Remains is a collection of quiet, precise vignettes that follow a night-shift nurse through the hours when machines and people breathe in different rhythms. Robert Hillari renders the hospital as ascape of small rituals — sleeves tugged down, trays smoothed, monitors counted — where time warps and memory intrudes. Each chapter is an attentive study of sound, touch, and the private economies of care: a fan that will not stop, a light that refuses to go out, a handprint on glass that fades when you look too closely.

These are scenes of waiting made intimate: the patient’s soft tapping under a blanket, the rhythm of footsteps counted to keep the world in order, the subtle moral choices embedded in the words we use on a chart. Hillari’s language is spare and lyrical, a steady voice that listens rather than explains. The Quiet That Remains is for readers who like literary observation, humane attention to small moments, and the tender strangeness of nights where the real work is simply staying awake to notice.

— perfect for fans of literary short fiction, workplace memoir-in-episodes, and meditative prose that lingers on the human details of care.