Wallflower

       Glare from the windshields in the parking lot below bothered her eyes. Fiona drew away from the riot of color and rejoined the hallway, where drab buttercups dotted the wallpaper and pale lilies framed in tarnished gold metallic emphasized the antique nature of the geriatric population.

       Still clasping her hands behind her back to keep her backbone straight, Fiona sighed and listened to the rest of the floor. The sounds on the lower levels were muffled by the flat carpeting; the cacophony of canes in the activities room merely scratched the laminate wood, though Fiona knew the tap dancing lesson always took place at this midmorning hour on days after visitor’s day.

       Somewhere down the hallway someone had their television loud on a game show. Fiona nodded to herself, as she was the only person in the hallway. It touched her as a bit sad that she recognized the winning bells of a contestant guessing a price right on the nose. Or was it when they spun the wheel and won thousands?

        Her hand grabbed for the back of a chair at a round table some manager had sat in the hallway for people to gawk at. Few people ever used them. When Fiona pulled out the chair it stuck to the carpet where its feet had ingrained wells into even this industrial carpet.

       From the bounce when she sat down, she could tell that she was one of the first to have done so. After a few minutes the novelty wore a sore spot on Fiona’s bottom and she had to get up. She walked to the window again.

       The backs of the pristine chairs became handholds along the way to the parking lot vista. Fiona looked out although she knew what she would see: the candied shells of Beetles, Mustangs, Yukons, and Nissans with half their lights smashed in. Fiona stared and stared until her eyes smarted. She closed them willingly.

       The television snapped off somewhere. Bells stopped ringing, but further along – and Fiona knew it was far along, since her hearing had been honed by limitless practice – furniture bumped against the wall with rhythmic insistence. Fiona was not the only one awake and not out and about this morning, after all.

       And what had she to be tired for? She rubbed the streak in her back that always rang from cold or tiredness. No one had come yesterday, not Jim or any of his brood. Certainly not Diane; she remembered that her Jason had been in the hospital and she said a quick prayer for her daughter’s husband.

       There was no one else. The others having seen their pitying families slept deeply in illusive dreams colored more interesting by new conversations, and old faces that seemed new as they changed from infancy to blooming youth in fast reality.

       Yet Fiona kept the same thoughts, the same fixed visions in her wakeful sleep. She imagined the conversations taking place in further hallways involved her, too.

       She opened her eyes on the frames gilded to look antique, and stared at the stale lily made lovely by its isolation among papered buttercup fields. Fiona told herself that the window was just another frame on a painting too bright to be looked at too closely. The view was better from here.