Work Title

These Things She Loved

Creators

Janet Jarrett

Description

Nancy McIntire lay quite still in the great four-poster bed. Her tiny shrivelled frame was huddled beneath the covers and her eyes had lost their old sparkle. She knew that what everybody said was true, that she would never again leave her bed. For Nancy McIntire was nearly ninety.

There was a narrow band of sunlight streaming through a crack in the shade. Dumbly she watched the particles of dust caught in its rays. Bits of matter suddenly snatched up in their idle drifting by a slim golden shaft, turned into a thousand shimmering little worlds, and then dropped back into the darkness.

"Maybe that's what people are," she thought, "tiny things suddenly bathed in a lovely light and then ceasing to be. Or maybe that's death, a step from out' of darkness into a dazzling light."

Recommended Citation

Jarrett, Janet (1942) "These Things She Loved," Manuscripts: Vol. 10 : Iss. 1 , Article 6.
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/manuscripts/vol10/iss1/6