101 Words

“Damn!!”

Sam stared at the Sudoku puzzle. This was his third failed attempt to solve this puzzle. The difficulty level was only ‘Intermediate’.

Four years ago he had routinely completed almost all the Sudoku puzzles with difficulty of ‘Evil’. Over the next three years, the number of puzzles solved become less and less until he had been forced to abandon ‘Evil” puzzles and downgrade to ‘Hard’.

This year he had been forced to switch to ‘Intermediate’ puzzles, which were now becoming more and more difficult to complete.

Thus did Sam measure his descent into dementia. God, how he hated that word.

“Men communicate at their convenience,” Madeline’s mom told her, and mom knew about men. She married seven of them.

Madeline married once, and her Steve was a joker. He’d bypass meaningful conversation and move straight to a punch line. Always.

Ten years later the jokes stopped.

“I want you to be present when I talk to you,” she told him Christmas Eve. Predictably, Steve ran upstairs and rushed back down with a bow tied around his head.

He laughed and laughed.

So she put him under the tree.

And she laughed and laughed.

She also giggled when they dug him up.

An associate professor, she had the credentials to teach German. She was well-educated and had worked hard day and night to earn her spot on the prestigious faculty. She gave up opportunities, chances for happiness, potential flings of passion — all for this aspiration.

But she couldn’t get through to the students.

The bags beneath her eyes were heavy as she spoke with the department chair, her boss. The students’ complaints had grown increasingly vitriolic. “Budgeting restraints” kept her without tenure. It was the fourth year in a row.

That night, she cried alone, the tree’s ornaments reflecting her face tenfold.

“That’s how a family should be,” he stated with authority as he watched “Leave it to Beaver” on his flat screen. “June Cleaver is hot.”

So I bought a hot dress, mid-century modern they call it. And one of those cone-cup bras. He liked them sticking out. Hosiery with a seam in the back and black heels. He started wearing a cardigan sweater to dinner and smoking a pipe. He said we needed to have children, a couple of boys.

For his birthday I bought him “Twilight Zone,” the complete DVD set, and went shopping. When I returned, he was gone.

Jane parks in a restricted zone near the hospital entrance and glances around nervously, expecting a security guard to scold her. She has visited the hospital many times, for well-baby visits and flu shots, but she’s never pulled her car into the patient pick-up lane. The red curb glares at her accusingly. Restless, she gets out and leans against the car door, her feet balancing on the edge of the curb. Her shoe dislodges a piece of peeling crimson paint. Jane kicks it away, revealing the bare concrete below. Like most things, it’s less intimidating once you get past the surface.

Sitting up on the bed. Ears are alert to the constant beeping of the monitors. Eyes survey the sterile hospital surroundings. A man stands at the foot of the bed. A photographer is next to him.

“You are a hero. As the Mayor of the city I am proud of your accomplishments”. The Mayor moves next to me and the photographer takes our picture.

I tried to kill a man by pushing him in front of the subway train. Before I could pull back, my arms were broken. Commuters believe I was trying to stop a suicide attempt.

So be it.

Sandy and Ben’s sitter called in sick so, against Sandy’s better wishes, they left their ten year old son and his grandfather alone while they went to the wedding. Ben kept telling Sandy not to worry so she worried more and called home often until it became too late to call. Texts went unanswered.

Sandy’s concerns made them both have a miserable time at the wedding so they drove home silently, in the middle of the night, instead of staying over as planned. She never forgave Ben or their son for her father wandering away and her never seeing him again.