THE RECYCLER (A CHARACTER PIECE)...

Agnes liked the watch.  It was an expensive one and the woman was dead with no friends or family, so what harm would it do to take it?  She slipped it into the pocket of her uniform and made her way to the hospital canteen.

"After all," she thought, sipping her gin-enhanced tea, "it'll only go to waste.  It's not really stealing, it's... recycling."  She was pleased with this analogy, and a self-satisfied smile spread across her smug face.  "All the work I do, I'm entitled to a few perks."

Agnes was a nasty piece of work.  The kind of person who only 'helped' others so that she could feel superior to them.  "Look at them," she would think, "lying there in their own filth.  I clean them, I fetch and carry for them - they'd be nothing without me."  And thus would she wallow in the misery of others to validate her own existence.  Like a parasite needs its host, Agnes needed the sick and needy.  Her life was nothing without them.  The irony of her needing her patients as much if not more than they needed her was lost on her.  If ever a more selfish, spiteful, sickening and soulless creature strode God's good Earth, their existence was lost to recorded history.

Every act of 'goodness' did not go unannounced.  Every tenuous opportunity to introduce her latest act of 'charity' into a conversation did not go unexploited.  She was her own best public relations officer when it came to relating all her many splendid and 'unselfish efforts' on behalf of the disadvantaged.  It is the nature of vultures to feed off the dead, and Agnes strode the corridors of the dying in much the same way.  She fed off their groans and screams, and drank in their agony.  When they expired, she feasted on the tears and misery of their loved-ones, revelling in the fact that she was in the midst of it all and that it gave purpose to her being.

Like I said... she was a nasty piece of work.