Dotage -

“That’s all right,” she said. “You forgot it ten years ago. You forgot it yesterday. You’ll forget it again tomorrow. But you always find your way back to this bench. You always find me.”

He walked until he found a park bench. The trees were bare. A woman sat at the other end, feeding crumbs to pigeons. She was old, like him, but her eyes were clear. She wore a red coat. Dotage

It was a peculiar theory, but at eighty-seven, he’d earned the right to be peculiar. One morning, he simply couldn’t recall the word for the thing you use to turn a page. Thumb. The object was right there, attached to his hand, a fleshy little post. But the name had floated away like a helium balloon. He called it a “finger-brother” instead. His daughter, Elara, had smiled tightly. That was the first crack. “That’s all right,” she said

Every morning, he would wake up and assemble his world from scratch. The bed was a raft. The floor was a cold river. The nurse, a sharp-boned woman named Patience (truly, that was her name), would hand him his teeth in a little plastic cup. Prisoners, he thought, looking at the teeth. I have freed them for their morning exercise. You’ll forget it again tomorrow

“There you are,” she said.

The other residents were ghosts in a waiting room. A man named George cried for his mother every afternoon at four. A woman named Helen believed she was a duck and refused to eat anything not thrown to her from a distance. Arthur found Helen the most sensible person in the building.