The Night of Their Lives

Lloyd nodded and gave a soft grunt, his eyes already closed and his eyelids fluttering. Margaret reached out and touched Lloyd's hand and they locked fingers before passing over into sleep.

* * * * *

Millie glanced at the clock on the wall at a little before six in the morning. The end of her twelve hour shift was coming up, and she was ready to go home and get some sleep. It had been a quiet night, just as it usually was on this floor. Most of the residents here were fairly self-sufficient, unlike some of the other floors in the facility. Suddenly, an odd feeling came over her. She looked around the corridor, seeing nothing out of the ordinary. Still, she got up from her seat and walked up and down the hall.

When she reached room 603, she felt alarm rising up in her chest. The door to the room was ajar. She knocked lightly and listened for a response. Silence was the only reply she received.

She pushed the door open a bit more and called inside. "Mr. and Mrs. Anderson? Are you folks alright?"

Still receiving no reply, she opened the door a bit more and walked into the room. She could see the couple curled up together on one of the beds. Millie had seen enough dead bodies to know what she was seeing. Even so, she rushed over and put a hand on each of them. The cold of their skin told her all she needed to know.

Minutes later, her supervisor and a physician were in the room, examining the Andersons. Millie was sitting on the small couch in the room, fighting back tears. She really loved this old couple, and she would miss them.

"Are you sure no one came into or out of this room last night, Millie?" asked her supervisor.

"I'm sure, Kris. It really was a quiet night."

"And you stayed awake all night?"

"Yes, I was awake," snapped Millie.

The doctor turned to Kris and shrugged. "They were a hundred and two years old. We can draw fluids and see if anything shows up, but I'm not expecting to see anything unusual. My guess is that one of them died, and the other one curled up next to them and just stopped living. It happens, you know."

"I suppose," said Kris hesitantly. "But the thing I don't understand is how these got attached to their wrists." She looked at the paper wristbands in her hand. "Dinner and dancing at the Hotel Astor," she read off one of the wristbands. "How do we explain this?"

"I've come to realize that there are some things that just can't be explained in this life," the doctor replied. "Oh, and for the record? The Hotel Astor was demolished in nineteen sixty-seven. I remember because my grandparents used to go there and told me stories about the place. Try explaining that one, Kris."

"I'm not even going to try," said Kris as a chill ran down her spine. "Not even going to try."

*****

I'd like to thank AMoveableBeast and especially stlgoddessfreya for their input on this story. Any errors or omissions are entirely my doing.