Nurse Olmstead, the Tapioca Queen, the retirement home’s own hussy. Grandpa didn’t think death would come like that, on a idol Wednesday night at the Serenity Retirement Home. It made sense, that’s how most of them went, but how embarrassing to survive all that -- the war, marriage, parenting, the sixties, cancer, the eighties, god the eighties -- and then here, right here on the floor of the lobby, dead from a twenty-something with a twelve gauge shotgun. What a total whore.
Sally would feel horrible. He didn’t want her to feel horrible, pulling the ‘early morning’ card on the night of dear old dad’s death, but at the same time, she could have come in for a night cap.
It wasn’t how he suspected it. From what he knew, death was like in the movies, but smellier. He remembered that from the war. The VC with the bayonet. It smelled salty, his blood, and then the last breath, like a smoky exhale, the kind you do at the doctor’s office when they tell you exhale, except with a horrible acrid taste -- the VC’s with a hint of tuna. Then the eyes glaze over like a fishes staring, staring, staring, looking for something to get them out of this mess. That’s what the VC had taught him, but that commie was full of shit. It wasn’t anything like that.
No ether. No light at the end of the tunnel. The afterlife looked like a poorly-paneled ceiling with recessed office lighting, much like the lobby of the Serenity Retirement Home. He blinked. He sat up.
Nurse Olmstead’s shotgun barrel poked out from behind the counter. It swiveled as she surveyed back and forth. There were two bodies on the ground nearby. Old men like him. The Stiff was there in true form, erect to the end even without a head and then one other headless figure pooling his life’s work onto the linoleum.
The Tapioca Queen had flipped. She would kill them all if he didn’t take her out. Here it was. Iwo Jima all over again. Enemy bunker.
He crawled against the counter, the barrel surveying right over his head. He could hear her breathing. He felt great, better than he had in years, hearing keyed, eyes sharp, a regular spring chicken. He followed the barrels pattern with his eyes, first left, then right, and then with his hand, back and forth, beneath her line of sight.
He grabbed the barrel and pulled it away from the nurse. She hung on for a moment and then lost her grip. She followed it over the edge trying to grapple for it before it dropped down. Her hands showed, then her arms and her face. She yelped, eyes wide.
“Respect your elders!” Grandpa said, the barrel poking her in her chin. She closed her eyes. He cocked back the trigger. He would have shot. He was going to shoot. He had no reason not too, unless she were feeding him tapioca, that is, but suddenly he had no desire to kill her. He wanted something else.
Her brain.
No comments:
Post a Comment