Making Friends

Gretel didn’t want more friends. The ones she had kept dying.

Philip from bingo and Judith from tea and Simone from across the hall: gone.

Angelic memories make poor company.

She waited, troubled, in this purgatorial home. For what, she did not know. She offered quips to the nurses who laughed with bright smiles of a different generation and then went home. She offered seed to the birds who flew near and away again like lightning’s flash.

Then Walter arrived, and like two dying stars they shared a glow that would not last but warmed her days nonetheless.