Am I Old Yet? — Comedy audio drama · Flloyd Kennedy

Purgatory

·23 min

Helen is trapped in a white nowhere. She keeps herself occupied in her head, wanders through song and scraps of poetry, and starts to wonder whether this blank space is purgatory, death, or just boredom taken to an extreme. She is not thrilled by any of those options. She works herself toward a material answer, deciding that if the body returns to the soil and the mind cannot live apart from it, then she must still be somewhere in between. Trees become the thing she wants most. A big tree, with bark, leaves, breeze, rain, and thick brown soil, feels more real than any afterlife theory she can put together. That longing gives the opening its shape. The hospital world keeps bleeding in at the edges, and the dialogue stays busy with small corrections, titles, and the awkward little rituals of sounding calm. Mrs. Macmillan insists on the proper form of address. Cassie is her mother, so ma'am and Mrs. Macmillan both matter, and the exchange becomes the kind of etiquette dispute that this story enjoys stretching out. A staffer is reminded that a tibia cannot be left hanging by a thread. The line lands exactly as intended, with medical urgency sounding faintly absurd because everyone is still trying to be polite. Susie arrives with the family. Her parents crowd the bedside, notice Helen's black eye, and ask whether she has woken up or whether they will have to wait longer for the scan results. Waiting is the real subject. Someone lays out the range, from a mild concussion to severe brain damage, and the room has to sit with that sentence while pretending to keep moving. Helen's inner life keeps doing work the people around her cannot see. Other voices, including John and Janie, seep through the dream and blur what belongs to the room and what belongs to Helen. It folds memory into present tense, and even the thought of her mother becomes part of the same uncertain drift that started with the white room. A child's fear of being abandoned also rises up, along with the firm promise that no orphanage is coming and no one is going anywhere. The episode keeps that mix of tenderness, literal-minded comedy, and low-level dread until it feels less like a plot turn than a shared attempt to make sense of the dark.

As heard by us

A hospital limbo that gets its humor from manners, uncertainty, and quiet panic.

Helen stays boxed into a white, sealed-off headspace, talking herself through boredom, disbelief, and the possibility that she may already be dead. The tree she wants to see gives the piece a spare tenderness that keeps the silence from feeling empty.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a white-room comedy while everyone waits on a scan.

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