Forgotten ?

                                            By Jacob J.C. Tolman

My body doesn't work like it used to.  My hands ache every time I reach, shakily, to pick up a fork to eat with.  After a few bites, I toss it down onto the plate, push it away grumpily.  There is a pencil nearby and I grab at it.  It takes two tries, but I finally get my fingers around it.  Slippery things they are.  I start to scrawl on a blank sheet of paper next to it in hopes to still be able to write something important.

Nothing but scribbles come of it.

Smaller circles into larger ones.

Nope, still can't do anything legible.

I frown and throw the pencil away.  It flies through the air, end over end, and clatters onto the linoleum floor, rolling into a corner.  

A nurse sees this, walks over to me.  Her name is Betty, like Betty Boop.  She's not anything the same though.  Short and fat, with a big head full of long blonde hair that reminds me of a horse's mane by the thickness of it.  Her nose is big and wide.  I would call it a bulbous type and her breath smells of cat piss.

"Cob, my dear.  What is wrong now?"  She said it in a way to tease me.  

I didn't answer her and I turned my head to avoid that hot and rancid odor that accompanied her speech as she stopped to hover over me in an unadulterated way.  She leveraged her fists on her meaty hips and looked at me with all her corpulence.

I looked out the corner of my eye after a quiet moment, cringed.  She was still there.

She tsked me, pinched my cheek and said, "We'll have none of that from you today Cob.  Not unless you want to visit the Board Room again."

I made a face of disgust, still not willing to look all the way at her.  Stubborn I am.  It's all I have left. 

Betty scoffed and turned on a heel, stomped away.  Blocky and desperate in the way she moved out of my vision.  

I have won.  Sweet victory.  I forced a smile on my face, but gave up trying after a couple of pathetic attempts.  It had to be because of the skin on my face sagged heavily now, hanging in folds about my neck like a turkey.  This is what I tell myself, of course.  I know why I won't smile.  No, can't smile.  

Lost and forgotten I am.  An empty hollow shell of the man I used to be.  Which was a young man full of life who loved to explore everything new, old, and in between.  And the ladies, well I didn't have to worry about sleeping alone.  Money was stacked high, never short of that either.  Oh, how everyone loved the young Cob.  

But now, now nobody cares.  About me that is.  I can't blame them.  I did it to myself.  Choices you see.  More bad than good.  And now, in my old age, I dwell here in a white castle.  I like to think of it as that, even though it's nothing more than a poor office space turned into a nursing home for the likes of old fogies like me and... more of the forgotten.  An over crowded place and waiting to die.  

Prison.  Pain.  When will it end?

I close my eyes.  I've lost count of the years here.  Days seem to be like the wind.  Blowing through and then it's gone.  I need help standing.  I can only move around with the use of a metal contraption with wheels.  Unsafe it is, but I'll manage.  I've already taken a few falls, ended up in the hospice bed for weeks.  That too was a blur.

Love is a thing of the ancient past.

What does love feel like?

I don't know.  Couldn't tell you anyways.  I don't even believe it's real anymore.  It's a mythical giant of my way distant past.  It roamed the earth in the days before the great flood.  I think love was made up by a Shaman in some foreign land, while hallucinating on a root of some kind and dancing with the movement of the clouds.