The Wayclock Institute closed its doors nearly twenty years earlier, the building itself all but abandoned.  Only Priscella Wayclocks, the daughter of the clinic's founder and later its chief administrator, remained on the premises.  Silver haired and with a stooped gait, Priscella Wayclocks stayed in the same apartment in the medieval looking structure in which she was raised.  Indeed, Priscella spent all her life in the same space.  Her only companion, of such, was a feral cat that haunted the building like a faint spirit.

The only real reasons the tomcat stayed in the building rested in the fact that mice easily could be snatched and because Priscella set out a plate of tuna fish and a saucer of milk for the animal each morning.  Priscella never touched the cat, he never permitted her to get close enough to him.  However, she did see the feline at least once each day.   She took to calling the tomcat Oliver after the Dicken's urchin and orphan.

At dawn on the first Friday of May, Priscella rose from bed and went to her kitchen to steam up a kettle for tea, Earl Grey.  While the water heated, she retreated to her room to do up her hair into a tight bun.  Still in her nightgown, she retraced her course to the kitchen and poured the boiling water into a cup with a tea bag placed neatly inside the night before.  As the tea steeped, she toasted a slice of rye bread and poached an egg.

With the egg, the tea and the toast, left dry, she sat down at a petit rosewood table in the corner of the kitchen.  In a peculiar way the top of the table resembled the windshield of an auto in a snowstorm.  Grayish-white dust covered the bulk of the table save for an arch shaped space directly in front of where Priscella took her breakfast.  The space at the table looked to have been swept clear by a vigorous windshield wiper.

Priscella Wayclocks ate very slowly, not in an attempt to savor the toasted rye, the water boiled egg or the Earl Grey.  Rather, she looked to be pained by the process of eating.

A soiled window, with a once white curtain turned tan colored with age, was set directly above the table.  Although the sunrise that Spring morning was loaded with red and gold and violet hues, the view at the window glass was like looking from six feet under and through a fine layer of shoveled soil.

Once finished with her light morning meal, Priscella carefully washed the teacup, the toast plate and the chipped china saucer.  Leaving the dishes to dry on a tea towel spread next to the sink, she opened a can of “Merry Whaler” tuna and spooned the fishy contents onto a plate for Oliver.  She poured milk into a saucer for the tomcat.

Walking from her kitchen, through the parlor, carrying the plate and saucer on a small tray with faded painted oriental roses, she reached and opened the door to her apartment.  She stepped out into the cavernous hallway, dimly lit only by the light of the sun misting in through soiled floor to ceiling windows at each end of the floor.

She set the tray and its contents onto the floor.  “Oliver,” she called out, her papery voice breaking between the syllables.   The only word uttered by Priscella Wayclocks on a given day was “Oliver,” thrice.

“Oliver …Oliver.”

With the food for the tomcat in place, Priscella retreated to her bedroom and dressed for the day.  She donned a stiffly starched white uniform and a cap with a red cross precisely embossed on the front and center.  On her feet she wore thick-soled black shoes, practical footwear for a nurse on rounds.  As a finishing touch, she threw a sweater over her shoulders, the old building becoming drafty in recent years.

In less than half an hour, she exited her apartment.  Opening her door, a startled Oliver spirited off down the hallway and away from his feast.  Slowly, Priscella began to make her way down the corridor.

Her first stop each morning was a small sized surgery room once used by her father.  Dutifully, Priscella attended every procedure.

Dr. Wayclocks was an avid supporter of the Virgina eugenics laws of the 1930s and 1940s and beyond.  He routinely sterilized his patients, those he considered undesirable and unworthy of procreating: the mentally ill, the physically deformed, healthy orphans.

On her rounds, as her first stop, Priscella made certain all of the instruments and equipment pieces were in place.  She made sure scalpels and scissors - rusty all - were correctly aligned on the surgeon's tray.  She flicked on the overhead lighting, one bulb finally burning to life, sputtering into a dim, gray glow.

She left the surgical room and walked back into the hallway.  She heard Oliver the tomcat scurrying somewhere down the corridor back near her apartment.  In little time, she reached a stairwell and began the climb to the second floor of the Institute.  The second floor was the location of three dozen patient rooms that ran the length of the level, with the same windows that ran to the ceiling at each end of the hallway.

Leaking water spotted the ceiling itself, the stains nearly the same color as the rust on the surgical instruments a floor below.  The remains of a crow, that somehow managed its way into the Institute weeks earlier, moldered in a midnight mound directly under one of the rising windows.

Carefully, consistently,  Priscella looked into the door of each patient room.  More often than not she nodded her head, approving of what she saw.  In time, she made her way from the second on upward to the third and fourth floors of the building.  She continued going from patient room to patient room in the same manner and along the same course as when the Wayclocks Institute for the Feeble Minded was filled with patients and residents of all sorts.

Just before noon Priscella reached the fifth floor of the Institute, the level on which Dr. Wayclocks housed a group of men and women with physical features so far from the norm that their entire lives were spent well within the walls of the Institute.  As before, Priscella went from room to room, looking into each space, nodding.

Upon reaching the last room on floor five, Priscella heard the faint, very faint, sound of laughter, a twinkling like tiny Christmas bells.  She walked into and across that last room and over to its window.  With the side of her hand she wiped as best she could the accumulated grime from a pane.  Looking down onto the grounds at the rear of the building, Priscella spied four youngsters playing a sprightly game of tag.  She shook her head.

Slowly, ever so slowly, she traced her course back down to the main level of the Wayclocks Institute.  As she went, the cheery sounds of the children grew stronger, more vital, as the frown embracing Priscella's face became stern, more severe.  In time she reached a doorway that opened onto the overgrown and littered lawn at the back of the building where the children played.

As Priscella Wayclocks opened the door the children froze and then quickly looked back in the direction of the building.  With no breeze to speak of, the youngsters hollered, screamed as the door to the Wayclocks Institute for the Feeble Minded slowly drew open.  In a beat, the children ran off like small squirrels seeking speedy shelter from something mostly unknown.

Priscella walked out of the building and into the early afternoon sun.  At the same pace, she walked across the untended patch of grass and weeds on which the children played.  She headed in the direction of a circular stand of weeping willows, ragged trees that surrounded a small patch of lawn that actually was tended on occasion by Colson Fordwick, an elderly native of St. Croix who served as the Institute's grounds keeper for nearly forty years.  Although not paid to care for the little patch of ground surrounded by the trees, Colson felt an almost religious obligation to do so.

Reaching the area between the trees, Priscella looked down at the first tombstone, that of her father, long passed.  In a moment she looked at the second head marker in the plot, which read:

Priscella Wayclocks nodded.