1
Rose has seen better movies.
Not that she doesn’t enjoy something artistic, mind you. But this?
This was goddamned depressing, is what this was.
Who the hell shows a bunch of old folks a movie about Death?
But that’s Gopi for you. A retired film director whose personal crusade is to educate the residents of Autumn Springs on the great films of the past. Even the artsy black-and-white ones.
Our own personal Criterion curator.
Still, she has to admit she enjoys these little productions of his. Tonight’s movie, The Seventh Seal, had been interesting, if a smidge on the slow side. But her friend put a lot of work into his presentation, and the folks who showed up seemed to enjoy it well enough. And even though the private theater (located in the Autumn Springs Community Center) is small—only about forty seats—it’s full every time he puts on a viewing. Heck, these last few months, folks had to RSVP via email just to secure their spots. And if they didn’t show they were banned from future RSVPing. And no one, not even Rose, wanted that.
Miller leans in close.
“I think a good portion of the audience is asleep,” he mumbles, and Rose smells the peppermint on his breath, a ghostly remnant from the cellophane-wrapped candies he always carries in his sport coat pocket.
Rose glances around and does indeed notice a few nodding heads. She also notes that Angela Forrest is sitting with Owen Duffield, grinning like a schoolgirl. The two of them are probably holding hands down at seat level so as not to make a spectacle. Rose smiles, happy that they’ve found love so late in life.
Many don’t.
Many don’t want to.
Rose considers herself the latter, a fact she has to remind Beauregard Mason Miller—he of the peppermint-scented breath—of every few weeks, it seems.
“Now that we’ve all experienced Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece,” Gopi says, standing before them like an old professor, his thick spectacles and tweed sport coat completing the impression, “I’d like to open the room to questions. Obviously, there’s a lot to unpack here, and I’m happy to answer as best I can.”
Rose sits up, feeling mischievous. “Why would Death bother playing a game of chess?” she says. “Our book club just finished The Book Thief, and it says that ‘Death waits for no man’, and I think that sounds about right.” She glances quickly around the room. “Present company excluded, of course.”
There’s a murmur of laughter from the others, and even Gopi smiles at Rose, his bushy gray, Hercule Poirot–style mustache—tipped up with a little wax at the ends—rising as he shows off dazzling white teeth. “An excellent question, Ms. DuBois,” he says with a wink. “Most believe that the chess game is Death’s way of proving there is no free will when it comes to dying, that no number of games played will ever jeopardize his mission, because fate must always win out over free will. Much like playing bridge against the Pickfords,” he adds, causing another round of good-natured laughter from the group.
Mary Reynolds (who is sweet on Gopi, Rose thinks) raises her hand and asks about the significance of chess being Bergman’s choice.
“Why not cards? Or cribbage?” she asks playfully.
“Ah!” Gopi replies, delighted to have a softball lobbed his way. “Good question. For one, many great thinkers consider chess a perfect metaphor for our daily lives, each move on the board being a symbolic representation of our free will. In chess, a good player plans ahead. They sacrifice when needed and strategize every decision.” He pauses, scans the room somberly. “And sometimes there are consequences to those decisions, and those consequences are not always obvious, right? Because they’re not necessarily things that occur right away, but often well into the future … too many moves ahead for us to see plainly.”
The room is quiet for a moment. Rose thinks about what Gopi has said and finds herself wondering if Miller knows how to play chess and, if so, perhaps he would teach her.
“For Bergman, however,” Gopi continues, smiling once more, “the idea came from a work of art. Let me tell you about a famous painting by Swedish artist Albertus Pictor, which inspired Bergman’s decision to have a knight challenge Death to a game.…”
2
When the Q&A is over, everyone makes their way out of the Community Center, most residents eager to get home and settle in for the night. A small group, however, gathers in the small courtyard at the rear of the building, where they stop to chat with friends or share lengthy goodbyes.
As Rose and Miller step into the biting autumn air, she shivers and pulls her wool cardigan more tightly around her shoulders.
“Allow me, please,” Miller says, and removes his sport coat.
“Miller, I don’t—”
“I insist.”
He settles the coat over her shoulders, and Rose has to admit that the heavy coat—along with whatever body heat it retains—abolishes the chill that had clawed at her back when they first stepped into the night.
“Fine, fine…” she says. “Now, I’d like to get home and have some hot tea, unless you want to socialize, in which case I’ll say thank you and good night.”
Miller chuckles and lightly touches her elbow, leading them toward the Greenview Apartments where they both live, along with twenty-four other souls.
Rose likes Miller—likes him very much—but wishes he could leave it there and not always be trying to court her with some foolishness. She is done with love. She’d been married, raised a daughter (who in turn raised her own beautiful son), and cares little for the complex bindings of a relationship or the aromatic allure of romance.
A former high school English teacher (retired for nearly a decade), Rose DuBois was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and had spent her entire life in the city before finally moving north to live out her days at Autumn Springs. Now she wants nothing more than a peaceful existence from here on out, free of attachments or drama or confusion or heartache, and she most certainly wants nothing to do with silly romances or the entanglements of men.
From the day she’d moved here, however—five years ago now—Beauregard Mason Miller had been an instant and constant companion: a funny, objectively handsome man who she appreciates spending time with. But he’s also a man she’s happy to leave at the doorstep so she can enjoy her peace and quiet: her books, her private space, her delightfully large bed, and her independence.
Rose wants no ties. No pets, no plants, and no boyfriends.
To her consternation, however, as they walk down the lit path toward home, she finds herself sparing a sidelong glance his direction, more curious than usual about the man who’d been her best friend since arriving at her new home.
Beauregard Mason Miller (“just Miller” he’d said that first day, the moving boxes still unpacked in her undecorated living room) is a tall man with a shaggy head of hair, a dimpled chin, and big, strong hands. He’d been a professor at Columbia College for more than forty years before finally retiring at the age of seventy-six, just a couple years younger than Rose herself is now. He’s good at cards, terrible at technology, and near impossible to upset, or even irritate. He has a savage sweet tooth (though where the calories go on his lean frame she has no idea) and enjoys detective shows (an entertainment he and Rose immediately bonded over, she herself being a junkie for a good crime story). He knows everything there is to know about ancient history, especially the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, which was his specialty at Columbia. He is warm and kind and gentle, and Rose supposes that she does love him in a way.…
But not enough to give up her autonomy.
Or her bed.
She’d been through too much, and grown too old, to let a man crimp her lifestyle now. If she ever finds herself desperately lonely, perhaps she’ll get a goldfish. Or a canary. Something small. Something easy.
Miller glances over at her, a smile curling his lips. Rose shakes her head brusquely and turns her eyes back to the path, slightly embarrassed at having been caught staring. Instead, she focuses on the ground, studies the ridiculous colored-tape lines running beneath their feet: The yellow line leads to the Community Center. Green to the Greenview Apartments. Blue to the Seaview Apartments. There is a red line as well, which takes one straight to the Medical Center—a large, square, concrete bunker of a building most residents try to ignore as best they can.
The Medical Center is where you went to live when it was deemed you could no longer take care of yourself. It’s where you went to see a doctor, to get treatment, checkups, or prescriptions.
It’s also where you went to die.
Five years I’ve been here, Rose thinks as they walk through the night. Five years … and how many more to go? Ten? Twenty?
Feeling a wave of melancholy (and blaming the strange movie for getting her moody in the first place), Rose looks up toward the night sky, wishing the spray of stars would do something to lift her spirits, make her feel good about where she is in life, where she lives, the person she’s become.
My forever home, she thinks, and fights off a surge of nauseating depression that piggybacks atop the knowledge that this place—from now until the day she dies—will be the last, and only, home she’ll ever know.
* * *
The Autumn Springs Retirement Home is less of a “home” and more of a campus. It isn’t the largest, or most modern, retirement facility in upstate New York, but it’s well maintained and well staffed, just nice enough for those who had diligently saved their pennies over the course of their lives to afford a comfortable—if not glamorous—way of life for their sunset years.
The bulk of the complex is separated into three large brick buildings: the main building, four stories high—and through which visitors and residents exit and enter the campus—is the Community Center. In addition to the theater Rose and Miller just left behind, the building also houses several large activity rooms, multiple classrooms (with rotating curriculums), a relatively up-to-date library, an outdated gym, an indoor pool, and the administration offices. The large front lobby includes a grand piano (rarely played), a reception desk, and a set of glass double doors leading to the parking lot and—beyond that—the greater world: a world the residents of Autumn Springs have, for the most part, left behind.
Directly behind the Community Center, just across a small concrete courtyard, sits a large dining hall, one that boasts a restaurant-sized kitchen and a diverse menu for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Nightly specials are always a surprise, and residents take their three meals a day there almost exclusively.
Stretching out to either side of the Community Center are two narrow brick buildings, each only two stories. If one entered the main lobby from the parking lot, the building to the left would be the Greenview Apartments, and the building to the right the Seaview Apartments, supposedly named as such because it rests a few hundred feet closer to the Atlantic Ocean than its partner (as the coastline is more than one hundred and fifty miles away, the “Seaview” branding is more whimsical, or possibly ironic, than literal).
A dense, state-protected forest horseshoes the campus’s surrounding grounds, which are spacious, if a bit rustic. There’s a trailhead of sorts (not state certified) at the foot of the trees that is wide enough for a wheelchair, followed by a flat dirt trail that never swells wider than a few feet. The trail tunnels through nature, leading to a small meadow and an old, boarded-up well. Although the forest path is rarely used by residents, the rear grounds behind the apartments also boast a lovely asphalt walking path—complete with a weathered gazebo—cutting through what is colloquially referred to as the “back lawn.”
To the east of the campus lies the broad, bubbling Seminole Creek, one of many natural springs in the region (and what gives Autumn Springs its moniker) that draw visiting grandchildren like a piper’s song. The land to the west of Greenview, however, is far less opulent, consisting primarily of a straw-grass clearing carpeted with hearty pachysandra and low brush. Other highlights include the sad brown cage of a forgotten community garden and a rather uneven, weed-spotted tennis court.
All of which, more or less, comprises the bulk of what the Autumn Springs geography has to offer.
Still, for most residents, it’s enough. There is always something going on in the Community Center for folks to enjoy, and the campus is large enough that, on most days, you can get in a nice walk (if it isn’t too cold outside). There are regular shuttles into town where one can day-shop or dine out, and regular group outings to museums, baseball games, and other activities. Some residents still have their cars, of course, but most hardly use them given the convenience of the shuttles.
That said, there are a couple things about the Autumn Springs Retirement Home that Rose, if she’s being honest, doesn’t much care for.
The first is having to live next to the CSX freight train line, which normally pulls anywhere from twenty to fifty cars, chugging and rumbling past on tracks that lie just outside the main parking lot and the west section of the back lawn, no more than a hundred yards from the brick walls of the Greenview Apartments. The massive train burrows past at sixty-plus miles per hour, wheezing a dense trail of black smoke into the air (and waking up every living thing for half a mile or more) as it winds its way north, toward Albany and beyond.
The nerve-frying bing, bing, bing of the crossing signal isn’t so bad, since it only occurs twice a day during the week and once on Saturday evening—at 8 PM sharp—but the deep grumbling of the massive engine and the ensuing lumbering trail of cargo cars sets Rose’s teeth on edge (usually right around the time she’s settling down for sleep), only to repeat itself again early in the morning, right at 7 AM on the weekdays. Since her apartment is at the western-most part of the building, and therefore nearest the tracks, she has it much worse than the others. But what can she do? She’d requested a different apartment just weeks after arriving, but every time someone dies (or “leaves,” if using the local parlance) a new face moves in, claiming they’d secured rights to the apartment many years prior.
Simply put, it’s something she’ll just have to live with.
Even worse than the train, however, is the creepy, abandoned building settled at the rear of the back lawn, the one residents and staff refer to as the “old asylum”; a decrepit, hundred-year-old structure hunched along the forest’s tree line, ugly and lifeless as an eyeless, concrete corpse. The long, single-story building has a moss-covered A-frame roof and milky-brown walls. The windows are boarded over and the metal doors securely locked, so there’s no chance one might mistakenly wander into its decaying interior. It’s an eyesore that gives most residents—Rose included—the heebie-jeebies, since it’s where they used to house folks who were dying or mentally ill, cleanly separated from the other, healthy, residents.
Some, of course, have suggested that the old building might be haunted.
The old asylum had, to date, escaped the demolition axe due to the fact (if rumors were true) that some great Union general had died there during the Civil War. Regardless of its historical significance (or lack thereof), every year or so there is renewed talk of tearing the decaying building down to the ground but, since the expense outweighed the benefits, it stolidly remains, a ghost of the past pigheadedly refusing to push itself into the afterlife.
Much like the residents themselves.
Copyright © 2025 by Philip Fracassi
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