Me in the cheap wing of the community nursing home

Me in the cheap wing of the community nursing home

fiction
edward w pritchard

This is Edward, slowly said the chief administrator to her new employee. The young girl was from India, or Sri Lanka or maybe Nepal. I smiled a little not to meet the new aide but because Mrs. Lawson called me Edward; Edward wasn't me and little definances kept me sane at the nursing home where I was sentenced to end my days. My friends called me Ed.

Edward used to work here, in this very retirement villa, long ago, when he went to College, said Mrs. Lawson. The new girl said something, very crisp, like folded english Country linens. She had a heavy, formal English accent laced with Hindi and it took me a minute or two to hear her.

Every afternoon Ed lifts weights and he spends a lot of time writing, he's up to eight million words.

Mrs. Lawson gave me Hersheys chocolate. She wanted me to write her another story about her Daughter. I didn't make her ask. Her daughter had died two years ago. Mrs. Lawson still is having trouble dealing with the grief. I folded over the page of the yellow pad that I had been working on and started a new story about Mrs. Lawson's daughter, Taby.
end