Scarlet Robe Creations

The shock hadn’t settled in yet.   A deep numbness took hold of every fiber in her body.   She walked aimlessly down the hospital’s corridor, not looking at any of those who passed by her, heading in the opposite direction.   The pale gray walls and the single gurney barely registered.   She turned a corner and stood frozen for a long moment as she stared down the lonely corridor. She was alone. The last few hours had been a blur.   Her mother was found, by a neighbor, unresponsive on the floor of her apartment.   The siren of the ambulance wailed all the way to the nearest hospital.   Doctors probed her mother’s unconscious body and seemed to speak in a foreign language. Aneurysm. Cerebral. Slowly, back against the wall, she slid to the linoleum floor, wrapped her arms around her legs and buried her face in the crevice between her knees.   Her mother was dying.   The God she’d given up on in college was allowing it to happen. ...

The two old friends met most mornings at the park entrance.   They would slowly wander the path which led along the east side of the pond until they came to a wooden bench they considered their own.   They had each reached the age of seventy-nine in the past six months.   Elmer Benson was a widower, having lost his wife three years ago.   Paul Hagerty’s wife had been placed in a convalescent home a year ago with late stage Alzheimer’s. They both took a seat on the bench and watched a pair of ducks swim along the pond’s edge.   A young boy and a middle-aged man stopped to view the waterfowl. “I stopped by the home yesterday afternoon,” Paul said. “Don’t you most days?” Elmer asked, knowing his friend suffered the pain of visiting his wife daily. “She hasn’t known who I am now for nearly three months.   For a while she would seem to come and go.   My heart aches for her to come back one more time.” “Your Alice is a good soul,” Elmer offered. ...