Short fiction: An elderly woman celebrates a strange Christmas after a health scare

Their voices buzzed around her head like hyperactive mosquitoes irritating and annoying her, but she couldn't do anything about it. Vinny knew she was lying on a hospital bed; not dead but not quite alive, either. She could hear the usual hospital noises all around her, metal trollies clanging, nurses calling out to each other and ward boys laughing as they muttered friendly abuses under their breath. The terrible smell of disinfectant and sickly bodily fluids that all hospitals seemed to have filled her with nausea.

Her daughters’ voices grew louder and louder. Vinny tried moving her head to give them a stern look, a look she had practiced to perfection over six decades, but she wasn’t sure it worked because their chatter continued, filling the hospital room with discordant sounds. A dull throbbing now began in her forehead and she closed her eyes.

Had her daughters always been so loud or was her hearing sharper now that she was in the hospital? How long had she been here? And why was she here, anyway?

Then she remembered.

“Mama, you’ve had a mild stroke. Nothing to worry about. The doctors wanted to make sure everything is alright so you have to spend a few days in the hospital....

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