Aged Comfort (Master Class)

Master Class 2014 Volume V

Professor SAM gave us the following instructions for this week’s Master Class prompt: 

   

Link up?

The challenge, should you accept it, is to use this line to END your story. It should be the last line of the story. You have freedom to change names as necessary to make the story fit.

You have until Tuesday, February 25, at 9:00 PM EST to link up your stories.

 Aged Comfort

Hilda said “bugger off you two, we don’t need you tagging along,” as she waved them away with her left hand. She carried a carved oak cane with a goat head on the top that curved into the shape of her hand on the right, her white hair piled on top of her head and held in place with an ornate hair stick her husband had brought to her when he came home from the Orient over fifty years ago. Even at 93-years-old, she held the power to exact her instructions.

“Okay Gramma, we will be in the conference room while you are looking around,” Jack said with a shake of his head. “C’mon honey, she’s either going to like this place, or not, and there’s nothing we can do to influence that decision, but be here for her when she gets back,” he slipped his arm around Carol’s waist, and they both walked away, in the opposite direction of Hilda.

The lady giving the tour looked like she was just a shade over thirty, not a gray on her head. “Do you like to sing?” she asked Hilda.

“Sing? At ninety-three I am doing well to answer the phone without a crack in my voice, but I did sing before senescence took a hold of me.”

“We have a group of seniors that sing every weekend, if you would like, you can join in and just listen,” the tour guide said.

“Do we ever get to go outside of this place?” Hilda asked as she trundled toward the third door on the right, down the long hallway.

“Sure you do,” the tour guide answered as she turned the key, and swung the door open to a light filled room of pale yellow.

“Where do we get to go?” Hilda asked as she looked at the room, touching the walls, the tables, and finally the brown, soft, reclining chair.

“There are all kinds of options, depending on what you like to do Hilda. We go to the museum…”

The tour guide did not get to finish her sentence before Hilda sat down in the brown recliner and laughed.

“What’s so funny?” The tour guide asked.

“I’m old enough to belong in a museum; I don’t want to go see the relics. How about someplace fun, like shuffle boarding?” Hilda asked as she leaned back into the chair, and pushed the buttons to raise her feet.

“Shuffle boarding?” the tour guide laughed a little, “Well I can’t recall anyone suggesting that before, but I don’t see why not.”

Before she finished talking, Hilda was sound asleep in the soft, brown chair. The tour guide went back to the conference room to let Jack and Carol know that it was probably going to be a while before they looked at anything else because she did not want to wake Hilda.

“Do you think she likes the place?” Jack asked of the tour guide. “We’ve been to so many, and she has not liked a one of them.”

Surprised when Hilda shouted out “Yes, I said Yes, I like this place just fine, as long as I can have the light yellow room with lots of windows and the soft, brown chair.”

Later, when Jack would tell the story to the rest of the family, he would tell them “it was only as the two of us waited for the others in the tomblike morning gloom of the conference room that Hilda amplified that Yes of hers” (Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar). 

  Images used in this blog are either mine or come from Morguefiles unless indicated otherwise.