Angel Of Mercy

chapter 7

The blasted thing was stuck in yet another knot.

"Ouch!" the woman gave an involuntary cry as she tried to pull the tangle out of her hair.

Karin winced, and threw the hairbrush aside.

She felt dizzy again.

By trying to straighten up her house, and herself a bit, she had overdone it.

So, now the poor woman lay stretched out on her worn sofa, a cool wet cloth across her forehead, and a scowl on her pinched and haggard face.

Besides the hair brush, on the old coffee table in front of her was a bowl with another cloth and some water, and what was left of an old battered book. It was one volume of an old set of encyclopedias several decades old, its cover half torn off, and pages sporadically missing or half moth-eaten throughout. She'd gone to all the trouble of unearthing the ragged thing that she had not seen since her childhood, and only succeeded in aggravating her headache and her dizziness yet again.

And, what she searched for was, naturally, mostly in those missing pages

Orangutans ...

Karin had hoped to do a little reading up on the species of her newfound friend, Maurice. She wanted to make him as comfortable in her home as she could for as long as he kept coming to visit her. And she did not want to start grilling him with questions no matter how curious she was about him and his people.

Also, Karin was not used to being waited on hand and foot by anyone, and had hoped to return at least a little of Maurice's favor.

But the book excavation was a disaster, and she had only made herself quite weak by hauling it up from her dark cellar. And all that work for nothing!

If I had the strength, I'd set fire to the blasted thing, Karin thought with annoyance. She made a mental note to get rid of all that junk down there as soon as she could. But I don't even have the strength to brush my own hair.

It did not help that it had been ages since she had even bothered to try to do anything at all about her hair. After all, who but her was around to look at it. And Karin had almost stopped caring about much of anything at all. Except that she got the Apes those dried foods in the wintertime, and the small foods she put out for some flocks of birds that lived near her home, she believed she had no other reason to go on living.

But then, she did something stupid and hurt herself out in the forest. And he had come. Maurice, an Ape, had taken pity on her pathetic human form, and somehow found his way back to her home, carrying her all the way, and had then set about trying to take care of her as best he could. And he had come back the next night to do pretty much the same thing, take care of her. Not only that, but talk with her. There communications were still a sometime frustrating mixture of his sign language, her human speech, and both their body languages. He was picking up her languages much faster than she was with his, but they were getting by very well with one another.