Adagio for Strings

Lynette couldn't help but smile as she saw the casket.

It was beautiful -- a whitewashed coffin of pine wood emblazoned with a golden cross. Of course, it wasn't real gold, but who particularly cared? It was vaguely the same colour. If one added lots of black.

And a green patina.



She frowned.

"Dear, isn't it s'posed to be -- AHUHK, EHUK, AHUHK -- ugh, gold? Like I asked fer?"



The nurse at her side, a dazzling beauty in the dreary, decrepit nursing home, merely smiled and patted the ancient woman's arm, mottled from old age and too many cigarettes when she was younger. "Now, now, Lyn," she said, in a tone that was evidently supposed to be comforting,

it is! Don't you see?"



The old woman squinted across the room from her deathbed, a metal contraption with rails, starched and bleached blankets, and what passed for a dirty pillow. "I see somethin', but it ain't gold," she replied cautiously, not trying to provoke another attack.



"Sure it is, Lyn! Your daughter sent for it just last week and it came just an hour ago. Now relax, Lyn, you have a long time ahead of you," the nurse suggested, again in an agonisingly patronising voice. "I'll turn off the lights now, dear!"



"Wait... no..." the feeble woman tried helplessly, looking harder at her soon-to-be resting place, willing her eyes to see yellow. Or red. Black. Purple. Anything but the brown and green...



And the lights turned off, with a soft plip.