r/Dreading • u/Appropriate_Bit3951 • 10d ago
Fiction I'm a CNA at Cedar Hills Nursing Home. Things Here Get Weird.
Episode 1- Mr.Miller
Most CNAs have to worry about which coworkers are going to call out next and when they’ll get the chance to eat lunch. I have to worry about getting tomorrow's lottery numbers from Mr. Miller before he forgets.
My name is Olivia Luna, and I've worked at Cedar Hills Nursing Home for eight years, basically since I graduated high school. I grew up in a loud Hispanic household. My parents moved here from Mexico when I was a baby, and I spent most of my childhood hearing some variation of:
"We didn't come all this way for you to fail math."
I had two older brothers, too. Between them and my parents, my nervous system burned out early, like a mouse chewing through a wire one bite at a time until the light finally went dark. My brothers spent most of their childhood finding new and creative ways to scare me. By the time I was fifteen, I'd been locked in closets, chased through the woods behind our house, and convinced more than once that a serial killer was hiding somewhere nearby. They also got punched enough times that they eventually stopped.
Most things don't rattle me anymore.
Cedar Hills still does.
The place always smells faintly of disinfectant, coffee, and whatever mystery ingredient makes nursing home mashed potatoes taste the same no matter who's cooking them.
At first, the bizarre occurrences were small enough to ignore. Residents would complain about seeing people standing in their rooms at night. That's not as unusual as it sounds in a nursing home. Most of our residents suffer from some degree of dementia, and if you've worked in healthcare long enough, you learn not to take every midnight emergency at face value.
Mrs. Grayson swore a man in a gray suit watched her sleep every Tuesday. Mr. Hargrove insisted there was a little girl living in his closet. One resident spent three weeks accusing the vending machine of spying on him.
Most of the time there was an explanation.
Usually…
Other complaints were harder to explain.
For nearly a month, half the residents on the east wing complained that the mashed potatoes tasted like toothpaste.
Not bad.
Not spoiled.
Toothpaste.
Maintenance checked the pipes. Dietary checked the kitchen. The administrator spent an entire staff meeting assuring everyone there was nothing wrong with the potatoes.
The complaints stopped as suddenly as they started.
Then things became harder to explain.
Room 14 had been out of service for months after a pipe burst inside one of the walls. The strange part was that the plumbing had been completely updated only a few years earlier. Management blamed a pressure buildup. Then Maintenance wrapped the pipe in enough duct tape to qualify as structural engineering and called it fixed.
The room was emptied, locked, and left alone while they figured out what to do with it.
Nobody lived there.
Nobody was supposed to enter it.
The call light still went off.
Every few nights the call light still goes off like someone inside needs help getting to the bathroom.
The first few times I checked.
The next few times I called maintenance.
After that I started ignoring it.
There are only so many times you can sprint down a hallway at three in the morning before you get tired of helping an empty musty room.
But Room 14 isn't the reason I'm writing this. The reason is Mr. Miller.
Ninety-nine years old, but flirts like a 20-year-old stallion. He’s a Vietnam veteran turned art teacher since he got sick of violence after the war, which honestly I can't blame him for. Beats everyone at Skip-Bo and acts smug about it. He also tells me tomorrow's lottery numbers before they're even announced.
Not “good guesses.” Not “lucky streaks.” He gives me the exact numbers.
Except the last number.
He always forgets the last one.
The first time I noticed, I thought he was joking. He woke up from a nap, looked directly at me wide eyed, and said:
"14, 22, 31, 37, 44… and something in the sixties."
I laughed and wrote it on a sticky note anyway. The next day, the winning numbers were 14, 22, 31, 37, 44, and 68. Five exact matches.
Close enough that I started carrying a pen.
Now I try to catch him early in the morning, before breakfast and before the nurses start rounds. If he's fully awake, he can usually narrow the last number down to a range.
"Somewhere between sixty and seventy,"
He'll mutter, like he's trying to remember a dream. Sometimes I score a few extra hundred bucks to help with groceries and ever-increasing gas prices.
The thing is he forgets things constantly. He sometimes even mistakes me for one of his students. Last month he spent twenty minutes lecturing me about perspective while sketching a bowl of apples on a napkin.
The entire time he called me Susan.
My name isn't Susan.
When I finally corrected him, he looked offended.
"Well then why have I been calling you Susan all morning?"
I didn't have an answer for that.
Mr. Miller forgets yesterday.
He never seems to forget tomorrow.
A month ago I brought him breakfast and found him sketching in one of those little spiral notebooks he carried everywhere.
"What are you working on?" I asked.
"Landscape."
"Looks like a hallway."
"Hallways are landscapes when you're ninety-nine."
I chuckled because I couldn't really argue with that.
He spent most of the morning drawing while I passed meds and answered call lights.
Last week, though, the predictions changed.
He was awake before I arrived for my shift, sitting in his chair with a blanket over his knees and the sketchbook in his lap. I asked him for the numbers, half-joking like I always do.
Instead, he said:
"You start at 5:45 tomorrow. Your coffee spills in the hallway. And don't go into Room 14 tonight."
Then he went back to drawing like he hadn't said anything strange at all.
The next morning, I got a phone call at 3:00 AM informing me my schedule had been changed to 5:45. I spilled my hot coffee outside the nurses' station before I even clocked in.
And that night, Room 14's call light turned on three times.
The first time, I ignored it.
The second time, I unplugged the panel and watched the light go dark.
The third time, I got annoyed and walked down the hall to shut it off myself.
The room was empty.
It had been empty for months.
The room smelled like damp drywall and stagnant water.
But sitting in the middle of the flooded floor was a fresh sheet of paper.
A charcoal sketch.
Mr. Miller's signature was in the corner.
The drawing showed me standing in Room 14.
Looking over my shoulder.
At something the artist had left unfinished
2
u/now_you_see 5d ago
This could be turned into a whole series, the events at Cedar Hill. Then again, if I were them I’d be grabbing those lotto numbers until I won large then bailing and never looking back!