…..the deathbed felt cold and sterile to the octogenarian’s hunched back, but she wasn’t living in this particular charmed decade anymore anyway. Her mind had left her body far behind and she had traveled back some sixty years in time, back to when she was a fetching young ingenue once more and all the talk of the town. Awe-struck boys within a ten-mile radius beat a path to her doorstep every night of the week and would nearly come to blows as they begged embarrassingly for her indulgences, and not a day went by when she didn’t feel wholly invincible and like the queen of the whole universe. This sublime happiness the old lady was experiencing while entrapped within a cruel time warp wasn’t some trifling, relative thing either. Rather, the ravishing debutante from yore knew it to be a permanent fixture written in the stars. She would always be young and nubile and an irresistible boy magnet in her sclerotic mind, even if her frail body and failing heart and the calendar hanging on one wall of her nursing home room emphatically suggested otherwise…..
