Chapter 1
If you were to look 'round the room, it looks boring, drab, a pale vomit color makes up the main color scheme. There is nothing particularly pleasant or unpleasant. It smells vaguely of human urine and hospital. It is almost dank, which is rather strange for a place that is a place of purpose. A place many go to live their final years and then pass on into eternal rest. The complete lack of beauty in such a place of purpose strikes those visiting the elderly as uncomfortably quixotic.
At the front of the ugly, bland, boring room, a man calls out, "I 17!" The gathered geriatrics, bend over their cards checking carefully for I 17. They scramble to check quickly wanting to be the first to shout their favorite word since coming to this place they have made their end of days home. The scramble to check their cards had resulted in 2 broken hips and a broken wrist, and that was just in the last 6 months. One elderly man had even fallen out of his wheel chair in a state of rapturous glee. That resulted in a pulled back muscle and he had to be rushed out and back to his room to convalesce. The excitement surrounding Bingo, could not be matched even by the glass of wine offered to the inhabitants at dinner.
In the back row, a small gaggle of old chiropteran, sit and knit, quietly carrying on amongst themselves. Checking bingo cards with some regularity, they snark back and forth, like actual bats. Who spend more than two thirds of their lives bickering with one another as they hang upside down from cave ceilings along with stalactites. This, would be the fourth Floor Knitting Society.
No one understood, why The Fourth Floor Knitting Society, attended events such as the daily bingo game in the first floor lobby. Already, Blanche, had had bingo twice and failed to notice in order to shout "bingo!" Which would have lead no doubt to more broken hips....
The worst injury had been three years prior when someone had managed to break their femur. Exactly how that happened even those present couldn't quite recall. They remembered less and less the older they got. So exactly how that femur had been broken during Bingo, was a nursing home X-File. It had in all actuality just been a bad fall from a wheel chair combined with brittle bones...
The 4th floor knitting society couldn't care less.... About broken femurs, wheel chairs, (though at least 1 of it's members w in one,) or about bingo. What seemed to bother them that day, like every day that they went down to the first floor lobby for Bingo, was in the whispered words of Hatty, "The caller's voice is SO annoying..... I wish he would shut up." Yes, they attended daily, even though they didn't care in the least about the game, hated the sound of the different caller every day, and sat around with their needles clacking in the back row. A murder of bats or of old crones, rather than crows, would be the best way to describe the Fourth Floor Knitting Society.
