Where I'm Left To Die, Alada Porter [room on the broom read aloud txt] 📗

“Come on Mr. Larson, you’ll love it here, once you get used to it,” she said, her face hovering inches from mine so that I could see every blackhead on her nose, every wiry brown hair sprouting from her upper lip, and marvel at the mauve lipstick smeared across her yellow teeth. Looking at her fat, glistening face made me yearn for my youth, when nurses were beautiful and didn’t try to wear you down with bullshit.

“Won’t you cheer up for me?” she asked after a long silence, as though she really believed in the power of such small words. I shook my head, and she sighed, taking her place behind me to wheel me into the Rec Room.

Even with all the windows open it was humid. The fan chugged away, desperately trying to create some sort of air circulation, but the heat was an impenetrable force.

Even the walls seemed to be suffering, the cherubs in the wallpaper wrinkled and stretched out, their pale faces turned yellowish brown under the constant pressure of heat and age, what had once been pretty boys now became fat old men. In some places the wallpaper had curled in on itself, revealing the bare wall beneath it, as though ashamed of what it had become.

“Can someone turn on the damn air conditioning?” I said finally, wiping my forehead.

“Oh, we don’t have any air conditioning here; it’s not good for the patients,” a nurse said, looking up from her game of chess with a man who clearly did not have the mental capacity to play chutes and ladders, let alone chess.

If I was younger I would have gotten mad, but as it was I just shook my head and tried to find something pleasant to look at. If I didn’t think about it maybe I could convince myself it didn’t exist.

A TV sat in the corner, looking older and weaker than any of the residents, with two giant dents on the top and side; dents which were no doubt the cause of the flickering picture quality and the permanent green and yellow tints to the images when they were viewable at all. But nobody else seemed to think it was an issue. Huddled there on the pale gray couch, they stared at the smiling green face of Johnny Carson with the careless open faces of dead fish, eyes glazed over with cataracts and mouths dripping with drool.

On the other side of the room was the game area, if you could call a wooden table with a chess board on it and a long plastic green table with several sets of beat up looking checker boards a ‘game area’.

On the long table a single old lady was playing checkers by herself, her brow furrowed in concentration as her shaking fingers tried to hold onto a piece for more than a millisecond before dropping it. Again and again she tried, and again and again she failed, the sound of the little plastic piece hitting the table unbearable somehow. Eventually she just let her hands fall to her sides, her back hunched over the table. The wooden chair shivered under the weight of her tears.

Silently I lowered my face into my hands, the image of my children dropping me off here and never looking back flickering through my mind, and before I knew it I was sobbing. I could hear my cries echoing through the room but nobody looked, or came over, or said anything.

What a place to die.

Publication Date: 05-11-2012

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