LEGAL STUFF: This vignette is mine. All mine. Read it all you like, but if I find it anywhere that I haven’t given explicit permission to, I’ll be Very Pissed Off.

For this vignette I attempted a different style from my usual. If anyone’s read Sandra Cisneros’s A House on Mango Street, it might look slightly familiar. I tried to emulate it, and this is the result.

All comments are welcome.

Pink Peonies

Too cold, she says. The air conditioner makes it so cold.

I nod, remember she can’t see me from behind the wheelchair, step around the small space left in the elevator and nod again.

But what can I do?

The elevator climbs up with a low hum. Too slow. I press the button with the faded white six next to it over and over as if pressing it a lot will make the elevator move faster. Nothing happens. The elevator still moves slow. I’ve been wheeling people around all day, and it never goes faster.

We wait in silence, listening to the dull hum of the elevator motor, until the high ding sounds that makes me jump no matter how many times I hear it and the small dirty six on top of the elevator door lights up. And the door opens, and I push her out as fast as I can, into a fluorescent-lit hallway filled with old people sleeping in their wheelchairs and their children or grandchildren trying to wake them up and the smell of pee and nurses trying to snub both the smell and the old people. The air conditioner is too loud and it shakes. There are pink peonies painted on the wallpaper but no one notices. I try not to. Maybe you’re not supposed to.

Goodbye, I say. The nurses will take you now.

Miss! Miss! Miss! she cries out suddenly, her dark eyes wide and her fingers white on the wheelchair arms. Miss! Miss! Where! Miss! she’s screaming now.

And then I think something’s wrong. But no one looks our way. Not the residents whose smell makes me hold my breath or the visitors who don’t belong or the nurses that scare me.

What? I’m right next to you.

The air conditioner is deafening now.

She stops yelling and says, You could hear me?

Great. She’s a nutcase.

Of course I can hear you.

She wants me to stay with her and she pats my hand, and I try not to pull away too quickly and I tell her no. Because she’s begging me and patting my hand with her cold one and suddenly the air is freezing and the lights are too bright. No, I can’t stay with you. And I walk away, and behind me I can hear her screaming: Miss! Miss! Where!

The pink peonies are staring at me as I leave, and I try to ignore them. Until I’m in the elevator that’s supposed to be sinking downward but isn’t because I can’t remember what floor I’m supposed to go to next and I can’t ignore the peonies any longer so I close my eyes. And I hear the elevator door open again and a grunt as someone pushes their wheelchair in. Someone takes my hand again and without thinking I pull back, still hearing Miss! Miss!, and turn around.

Don’t worry about her. A different old lady is looking at me. And since she knows what I’m thinking of I guess she was on the sixth floor too and she saw my stupidity and fear, and I feel even stupider. I don‘t remember her, I can’t tell them apart, they all have tags and ID bracelets and paper skin. Like the wax paper in the kitchen, oily and transparent, that I used to press between my fingers when my mother baked wondering at the texture.

Don’t mind her at all.

I can’t stay, I say. I have to explain to her. I can’t stay.

Don’t worry about her. She doesn’t say anything to you if you stay.

But what does she say?

Other Lady sits back in her wheelchair. Nothing important at all.

And now I’m impatient, because I want to escape from this place of staring, fading peonies and air that’s too cold and people in a daze. I press a floor button. I don’t know which. I rub my arms, trying to smooth down the bumps of skin and say: Fine. I don’t have to hear it.

She sits up again. I tell you, nothing important. She’ll only say one thing over and over. Nothing important.

What does she say?

I love you I love you I love you.

~ End~

Began: September 5, 2002

Completed: September 6, 2002