Auld Acquaintance (Part Three)

Brian Hinshaw

The 1996 World's Best Short Short Story

Sundog: The Southeast Review, Vol. 16, No. 2

The Custodian

The job would get boring if you didn't mix it up a little.  Like this woman in 14-A, the nurses called her the mockingbird, start any song and this old lady would sing it through.  Couldn't speak, couldn't eat a lick of solid food, but she sang like a house on fire.  So for a kick, I would go in there with my mop and such, prop the door open with a bucket, and set her going.  She was best at the songs you'd sing with a group -- "Oh, Susanna," campfire stuff.  Any kind of Christmas song worked good too, and it always cracked the nurses if I could get her into "Let It Snow" during a heat spell.  We'd try to make her take up a song from the radio or some of the old songs with cursing in them, but she would never go for those.  Although once I had her do "How Dry I Am" while Nurse Winchell fussed with the catheter.

Yesterday, her daughter or maybe granddaughter comes in while 14-A and I were partway into "Auld Lang Syne" and the daughter says "oh oh oh" like she had interrupted scintillating conversation and then she takes a long look at 14-A lying there in the gurney with her eyes shut and her curled-up hands, taking a cup of kindness yet.  And the daughter looks at me, the way a girl does at the end of an old move and she says "my god," says, "you're an angel," and now I can't do it anymore, can hardly step into her room.

Previously:  Parts One and Two

Next: Aftermath