It is an unwritten law that every institution should have its own smell Griffith thought snapping the heavy book shut and getting the tip of his long nose clumped between the pages.
'Ouch!'� the old man exclaimed in a thin cloud of dust.
'Etchiuuu,'� Griffith responded to the little particles' tickle of his large oblong nostrils.
The power of the sneeze sent the senescent head back and then down against the hardback cover.
'Ouch!'� the man repeated raising his head and rubbing his heavily wrinkled age-spotted forehead.
The aqueous blue slits stared down at the brown and white tiled floor of the Medical library.
Little incidents like that have happened to him since he could remember, which wasn't long back, because of that 'spiteful' disease that was inexorably eating his memory.
The wrinkled age-spotted finger rubbed the length of the small eye to wipe away the patina that hindered his vision.
Alzheimer's!
Griffith had suddenly remembered.
He did have small flashbacks at times, but nothing of substance. His memory, and all his knowledge, had been lost forever.
What a waste!
His brilliant mind hurling for time infinite in the oblivion of a devouring curse.
He had found it difficult to come to terms; unable to resign to all those hours spent on drawings of the human body ' those red veins, improbable piggy pink skin, purple ligaments and brown muscles.
A sigh. A soft, raspy exhaling that tasted of decaying.
Old age ' death sentence at its worst.
Life digesting and vomiting her most unwanted offspring in a sea of bile and putrefied substance.
Griffith resented it.
What had happened to his dream of an extended life? Of his experiments of a healthier man?
He blamed it on his inner self-doubts. He'd dread the idea of a Frankenstein comparison and so had kept all his experiments in the closet. Double locked.
The colour-faded sliver of lips wet with saliva.
He'll never get to live to a hundred and fifty!
Griffith had to resign to that too.
The blue iris fixed on nothing.
The increasingly feeble mind was treading through the layers of grey matter trying hard to remember what he was resigning to.
He gave up and moved on.
Griffith had to learn to do that too. It was best; frustration would set in otherwise.
Admittedly, it was becoming increasingly easy as a result of his mind weakening and his body deteriorating into a useless pile of creaking bones and horribly wilting skin.
He moved his scrawny leg.
Tentatively.
There was something that he could do with it, but he couldn't remember what it was.
He kept the limb in mid-air for a handful of seconds.
No.
He lowered it back.
A little brown square suddenly focused in his hazy vision.
He spent most of his days staring, Griffith considered sadly.
Staring ' at the impalpability of futility.
Staring at what he could no longer make sense of.
Staring through the fog ' visibility: nil.

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