Book Lover

Mrs. Farwig is a retired spinster cleaning lady with no friends, and no pets. She is dying of cancer in a dingy mid-western hospital after ignoring the pain too long. She has been a life long catholic and her only real contact with others, other than mass two times a week is the weekly trips she makes to the library. She is very worried about returning the library books that she still has out. Her legs felt week and the breeze from behind chilled her. She did not care that she had not paid the gas bill because her Super was a bastard that wouldn't turn up the heat to a reasonable level. It was probably his fault she caught the pneumonia anyway, which put her in this filth hole. She could not make the vapid teenage intern or the penguin RN that doped her understand that the book on the tray-table was due TODAY! There was so much bustle and weeping that she slipped right out the door with her walker and her caddy. She knew the Chester Arthur Public Library was only three blocks from St Jude Thaddeus Memorial, because she had worked in both buildings for forty years, on the graveyard shift, cleaning up after sticky children, perverts and the sloppy-dead, of which she was almost one. (Summery) The policeman who found the blue-grey lady in the ally behind the library assumed that the creature with the blanket around her shoulders was a homeless tramp trying to fish freebies out of the drop box her arm dangled from. He called the coroner and they took her to Mercy General: the morgue that all the transient corpses end up.