Aces Full of Links

What a beautiful story!

I now want more. What's next?

Is it sad because he's dying, or is it frightening because she's a psychokiller?

If it was a first date, I'd totally assume I wouldn't be having a second date. (Or probably a first with anyone else)

Who's to say she's a psycho? Maybe he deserves it.

The psychokiller angle seems more interesting, but if it's a revenge killing because he truly deserves to die, that would be intersting, too.

James, please write more. Kthanksbye.

I've written a sequel:

Faces, smiling and quizzical, stared back at her in the old photos from beneath her small, wrinkled hands.

The memories calmed her; memories as gentle as those hands.

She closed the photo album and returned it to its box underneath the bed.

OOOOooooh...end of life mercy killing maybe?

But that would imply they were long known to each other, and I don't get that from Part I.

Bull - it could also mean that she is a serial killer and does this often. She takes comfort in the faces of her past victims...

Oh, Brian, I love it. Nice 'n' creepy!

Not sure what it says that serial killer came to mind before mercy killer.

Yes, that too.

This reminds me of a short story I read in (middle?) school about an elderly lady who ran a boarding house and did a similar thing to young male guests who checked in. In the story she poisened their tea (not coffee) with cyanide that supposedly tastes like bitter almonds.

You're thinking of "Arsenic and Old Lace," a great movie (maybe you read the play?).

Neither saw the movie nor read the play. It was definitely a short story in a scholastic-type reader; probably adapted.

They were old men with pensions in "Arsenic and Old Lace." That's what came to mind for me as well, but it sounds like a similar idea but a different story.

funny, I'm usually the morbid one, but this time I just thought of it as simply existential. A simple observation that everyone dies and likes to be remembered. So I found it to be a touching gesture. It also becomes a self contained short story that way.

But, hey, the serial killer thing is cool, too.