Emerald Oasis

The Rabbit That Turned Into A Wolf

It was Joyce Patrick's first night at Emerald Oasis Nursing Home. Her room was number eighteen on the red unit. Joyce didn't quite understand why it was called the red unit when the walls were white and the carpet was purple. The other unit appeared to be the same. That was known as the blue unit.

Her first day in her new home seemed pleasant. The food was edible, the staff were pleasant and the other residents had interesting personalities. She enjoyed talking about knitting with a lady called Victoria. But she felt the conversation was cut short when a carer whizzed her off to bed after suppertime.

Her room was pleasant enough. Cleo hadn't finished moving all of Joyce's possessions from her old flat to here. The room felt like an empty canvas. Cleo was off this weekend, so she was sure that Cleo would start bringing more stuff in from home later. When she rolled over towards the window she saw that the clock. It was midnight and all she could hear was the footsteps of the night staff.

She couldn't bring herself to sleep. There was too much that she wanted to see. It wasn't long until she decided that she had enough and hopped out of bed to discover the home for herself. There was no point being in bed if she was wide awake, she thought. She opened the door and the corridor was dark with the exception of dim lights hanging from the ceiling.

She followed the purple path that leads to the garden. The door was tightly shut. She would have to wait until the morning before she could enter the garden again. She wondered if the fairies were sleeping or staying up. She could see orbs of pastel colours floating around outside the window. She wanted to fall through the glass and get inside.

She hoped that the fairies wouldn't mind that she was in her nightie. The nightdress she had one was nothing like the ones she had at home, it was a blue dress with lots of pandas. It was one of the new nighties that Cleo had bought her when she moved here.

She wondered if Cleo was going to bring some other clothes in. She hoped the weekend would come quicker, otherwise her daughter, Maxine would claim it for herself.

Her daughter Maxine was good at spending other people's money. She was unemployed and relied on her sugar daddy of a husband to pay her bills. She didn't see Maxine very often, but when she did certain things started to go missing.

She wouldn't be surprised if Maxine had flogged all her stuff. She hoped that Cleo would have intervened. But the two of them had been quarrelling ever since they were babies. As soon as Maxine moved out, Cleo did his best to avoid any form of conversation with him. They're even blocked on Facebook.

Joyce believed that something had happened outside of the home that made them resent each other so much. When Joyce was active on Facebook she uploaded a picture of herself and both her children and both of them had asked her to take it down. They didn't want to be seen together even if it was just a picture.

She wouldn't be surprised if she never saw Maxine again. She thought it was quite pathetic really. Maxine's son really got on well with Cleo's lads. She couldn't remember what Maxine's son was called, it was some sort of foreign name that she couldn't pronounce let alone spell.

Maxine's lad would have been in his twenties now. She had only seen that grandson twice. She thought that was quite poor. That was two decades worth of sweets and presents that Joyce would never be able to give to her grandson. The last time she saw Maxine was when she was confined to silver rails in a hospital bed.

Maxine was only there for five minutes. "Oh, you're here. I'm not needed then."

One look at Cleo was all that was needed for her to leave. Joyce wasn't sure if she even wanted Maxine to visit after all of that. Whenever she tried to ask Cleo what happened, he would try to change the subject into something else. Normally sports or Doctor Who.