Rot

By Kristina Kasparian

/ Second Place, 2025 Plentitudes Prize in Nonfiction /      

The stench clings to the flickering neon lights and hovers in the hall like steam—a blend of urine and mashed potato with a faint trace of mothballs. It reaches the elevators, making the few who arrive here wish they hadn’t. At eight, like clockwork, the ward goes wild. Every shadow is on the move, climbing the walls, painting them black. The woman with the cat grows restless in her desperation to find him. “Toots! Tooooooooooots,” she calls in her raspy voice, then chides him for straying before she loses him again. The moans from 1012 quicken, as do the footsteps that pace the corridor. It won’t be long until the howling begins.

There is no one at the glass-enclosed station and the phone has been left off the hook. The nurse has two floors of the residence to manage, and she is doing her best. She toggles between them, her step unhurried even when her pager beep-beeps. It’s all inconsequential anyway—these elders are at the finish line. Nothing she does or doesn’t do will change the outcome. Three more overnights after tonight, she counts as she shoves soiled towels into the hamper. By Friday, I might hear back about the promotion. This was not how a career in medicine was supposed to feel.

Madame Noelle’s eyes are shut, but she’s not asleep. She can’t sleep in the chair, and no one has helped her to the bed. The doctor didn’t come by today for her to tell him she doesn’t belong here, in this half-jail-half-graveyard. She was sent to this residence from the ER after her fall. She shakes her head at the foolishness of it all. The vase was much too heavy for the tray on the walker. She’d been overzealous, as usual, like the time she climbed onto the couch to adjust the frame. Still, she wasn’t supposed to end up here. She was supposed to be sent home with cortisone shots for her eroded knees and a daily check-in from a nurse. But the system is taking too long to organize her home care, so the social worker placed her here in the interim. “The doctor came while you were napping,” the nurse said, but Madame Noelle could have sworn she didn’t nap today.

She’s been craving a strong, gritty Armenian coffee and the warmth of her sundrenched living room. I don’t want my granddaughter to visit me here. I want her to come sit with me at home, elbow to elbow on my velour couch, with the cookies I baked that are waiting untouched in their tin. She shifts in her seat, suddenly uneasy at the thought of her jewels and cash tucked away in her closets, hidden in handbags and sheets and shoes. By now, others in her condo building must know she’s not home. Their gossip is like spilled wine racing across a tablecloth. Yes, tomorrow, I must see the doctor and insist he send me home.

Madame Noelle’s neighbor ventures into her room again, propelling her wheelchair with her bunioned feet. She spins in circles, inspecting the room, and warns Madame Noelle about the snakes and rats lurking in dark recesses. “Soon, they’ll come to your room, you’ll see!” she shouts with her crooked finger in the air. Madame Noelle waves her hand as if to swat an annoying fly. Get this stranger out of my room so I can get my sleep and be awake when the doctor comes. The neighbor erupts into her werewolf howl. Madame Noelle puts her hands over her ears and rocks in her chair. Voices from other rooms pile onto the howling. The nurse bursts in, flustered by the commotion, and wheels the werewolf away.

Alone again, Madame Noelle keeps rocking and begins smacking her lips. I’m so thirsty and I need to pee. She hears herself crack as she stretches her torso to tug on the cord with the red call button. She squints when the light flashes on. She must have pressed it by accident. She pushes the red call button again and the light flashes off. She sighs and rests her head back while she waits. She starts to hum a song she hasn’t heard in ages. It’s funny how the brain remembers. She smiles and rocks and murmurs the words as they stir to mind in her native tongue.  

“Pipi,” she says when someone finally comes to clear the food tray. The potato has cemented to the plate by now, like grout on a tile. She points to her water glass. “Pipi et eau. Je veux pipi et eau!” The nurse takes her to the toilet with her walker. “De l’eau SVP,” she asks again on the way back.

“It’s not a good idea to drink now, Madame Noelle. Come now, it’s time to get to bed.” Her hips and shoulders hurt under the nurse’s hands as she is maneuvered into the cot and tucked under the starchy sheet. They ache until she begins to drift to sleep. When did I become this sack of bones? This nightgown doesn’t feel like mine.

When morning comes, the ward looks more like a residence. The phone in the glass cubicle is not kept off the hook. Occupational therapists mill about, their faces young and rested and smiling. TV sounds pour out of the rooms and collide in the corridor. Those who are not forgotten get visitors. Madame Noelle has always been an early riser. Early to bed, early to rise, makes you healthy, wealthy, and wise! She must have learned this in school, in Egypt, and it has never left her mind. Now, her granddaughters have it at the tip of their tongue. Maybe they’ll have beautiful children to pass it along, and they’ll tell them it came from Grandmother Nono. So much for being an early riser when guardrails keep you trapped in bed. It takes hours for staff to get to Madame Noelle every morning because she’s the last room of the hall. I’m rotting in this hole while the social worker diddle-daddles on my file. 

She lies in bed like the lazy person she’s never been, waiting, assessing the comings and goings of footsteps, aching for the black-and-white photograph of her and her five sisters that hangs on her wall at home. Her eyes land on it every morning when her lace curtains billow and the sun tickles their faces, making them almost look alive. No, I won’t ask Jiko to bring the frame here—I’ll be home soon. Now that she thinks of it, she’s lucky that every home she’s had since Egypt has been bathed in light. Light makes long days as a widow slightly more bearable. Her kitchen in her corner apartment used to glow until sunset, until she’d pull her golden bread out of the oven and call her boys to the table. The condo she has now is also a corner unit. She knows everyone has their eye on it, whispering and waiting for something to happen to her, for the prized unit to finally vacate. She starts shuffling in the sheet and rattles the icy guardrail and clinks her wedding band against it to remind them that she’s still here. She is stiff from stillness. How did it come to this?

No bath again today. The man nurse cleans Madame Noelle with a washcloth. She doesn’t mind him as much as she first thought she would—he says bonjour and he’s gentle, even though he’s a man and he’s Black. She lies there, biting her lip in shame and pretending she is elsewhere as he erases the feces that have caked onto her inner thighs and under her fingernails. Her skin feels raw and open under the washcloth, but she can’t see the extent of the sores. After dressing her, the nurse escorts her to the chair and switches on the TV. Madame Noelle is saying something, but he speaks over her, assuming she’s talking nonsense. She stomps her foot and points to her nightstand at her glasses and dentures. Do they forget them on purpose? It must make it easier for them if I can’t see or eat or speak.

For Madame Noelle, shift changes are more maddening than the night. Shift changes mean long periods alone with her thoughts, and new people who don’t know who she is or what she needs. The next nurse finally appears with a tiny paper cup with her pills, and a slightly larger paper cup with water. Her lips are pursed, eager to drink, and she downs it in hungry gulps before she even takes the pills. “Mais NON!” The nurse looks furious. Now she has to fetch another cup of water for the pills.

It takes a few minutes for her to return. Madame Noelle peers into the tiny pill cup. The little yellow pill looks new. I don’t remember seeing it before. What does it do? Is it one of the ones I’m allergic to? The nurse won’t surrender the water. Instead, she presses it awkwardly against Madame Noelle’s lips, controlling the flow while her arms lie stupidly in her lap. I’m treated like an animal here!

“Madame Noelle, Madame Noelle, don’t be so agitated! Drink!” The nurse tilts her chin further. The water does feel so good, even when it runs down her neck and into her blouse. She points to ask for more, but the nurse has already turned to leave the room.

Madame Noelle wakes to familiar voices that sound angry. She doesn’t know that weeks have passed. She can’t pull her eyes from the ceiling, but after a while, she realizes the voices belong to her son and his family. Their names are buried under heaps of paper. She rummages but can’t find them. I can’t find…can’t… Her eyes have a milky white film over them. Dry foam has collected in the corners of her mouth where her tongue protrudes now and then. “Ay, ay, ay,” she says. She’s been sat in the chair with only one shoe on. She rocks as though she is wrapped in an obsessive prayer. “Ay, AY.” She stomps her shoed foot. “Ay, ay, AY”.

Her daughter-in-law is paying attention. “She’s trying to say something, isn’t she?”

Her son is adamant. “I want to speak to the doctor! What have you been giving her?”

“An antipsychotic,” the nurse admits after some time. “You see, sir, she’s agitated, and we can’t have residents agitated and hollering or singing through the night, disturbing the others.”

Her daughter-in-law snaps, “Wouldn’t you be agitated if you were left to rot in your own shit for hours?”

“We bathe her twice a week,” the nurse lies. “We have no choice but to use diapers. We just don’t have the staff to take them all to the toilet.”

“Ayyyy, AY!” Madame Noelle has lowered her eyes from the ceiling, but she is looking past her loved ones, as though she’s alone in the room.

“These aren’t even her clothes!” The daughter-in-law tugs hard on the back of the blouse that is barely warm enough for a winter day. She had marked each label in the narrow wardrobe with NOELLE in black marker. The label on this blouse says ANITA. “Two weeks ago, her dentures went missing, and now her left shoe? So you leave her with one shoe on? No, the dentures on the table are not hers! Have those been in her mouth?”

“We can’t do anything about that,” the nurse shrugs. “Residents wander in and out of rooms taking what’s not theirs, and the laundry service makes mistakes sometimes.”

When the doctor doesn’t come, Madame Noelle’s granddaughter sets out to find him. Taped to the glass of the nursing station is a reminder of the residence’s zero-tolerance for violence of any kind. “The staff deserves respect,” the poster says. The granddaughter almost laughs. And what happened to the adage of respecting one’s elders?

Beyond the glass cubicle, residents in wheelchairs sit stoned in the lounge. “Hi Lucy, come eat with me,” one man says. “That’s not Lucy, Dad!” The woman continues spoon-feeding him and flashes the granddaughter an embarrassed smile.

The doctor is in the cubicle, signing something in a chart. If the station had two doors, it would be impossible to accost him into conversation.

“She’s dying,” he says flatly.

“From what?” the grand-daughter says. “She wasn’t dying a few weeks ago! She had her independence and her wits.”

“From old age,” the doctor tosses the chart onto the desk and stands. “Sometimes, we have to change medications and we can’t advise the family right away.”

“But you’ve been administering the antipsychotics for a month! Does informed consent not count for the elderly?”

“We can stop the antipsychotics and give her morphine instead. Either way,” he clicks his pen and shoves it into his chest pocket, “it doesn’t matter. She’s old and dying and it’s time you accept that.” He rushes past the granddaughter and leaves her staring stupefied at the breathing mummies in the lounge.

In the evening, the male nurse comes to change Madame Noelle. They have to use a pulley system to maneuver her now because she can no longer make her body cooperate. Through an opening in the curtain around her bed, the family sees her right shoulder is jutting out of place. Her toes are black. But the doctor doesn’t come because there’s nothing to come for. There is no emergency at the end of life. That’s why the staff has secretly swapped the call button with the light switch. They can’t make it to every demented patient’s bedside. They need silence at night—silence and submission.

Meal trays don’t stop at the last room of the hall anymore. Cups of water have been replaced by green sponge cubes on a stick for Madame Noelle to suck on if she can summon her mouth to close. Even if they were to find her missing dentures now, they wouldn’t fit her mouth. Her rehabilitation plan has done the opposite. Had they reassessed her medications from the ER instead of rotely renewing them, they’d have known that her severe dehydration was from a diuretic she had no reason to stay on. The thirst unspooled her brain and body, steadily robbing her of her light and languages and lullabies.

“Ay, ay,” she moans, her forehead creased and tongue searching for saliva.

Madame Noelle has been erased.

When someone dies at the ward, it’s almost a crime scene. A flurry of professionals cross spaces that have become off-limits. There are examinations and interviews and paperwork to sign. There are mourners and matter-of-facters and the stench of dead autumn leaves. There are black-and-white photographs of reunited sisters lifted off the walls and belongings lowered carefully into a garbage bag. Then, the bed is remade and the cogs churn on.

The survivors survive a little while longer, unwashed and unwanted, shrinking in plain sight in clothes that are not theirs.