excerpt from Kindness
a one-act play
by Kathleen Thompson

 

PEGGY: What'd Mary die of, do you know?

GAIL: Don't you?

PEGGY: How would I know? I wasn't here.

LIDDY: It was the strangest thing.

GAIL: It was.

LIDDY: I'd never heard of anything like it, had you, Gail?

GAIL: Never.

PEGGY: What was it?

GAIL: Well, you know how she had the sugar diabetes. Runs in her family.

LIDDY: I guess it runs in everybody's family. Everybody that has it.

GAIL: Well, Mary had it.

LIDDY: And there was so much she couldn't eat.

GAIL: She couldn't eat hardly anything.

LIDDY: So when she found something she could eat that she liked, she just ate it and ate it. Well, you can understand.

GAIL: That's what happened with the cole slaw.

LIDDY: She found out she could eat cole slaw and she just started eating gallons of it. She ate it all the time.

GAIL: It seems like you'd know it wasn't good to eat that much cole slaw.

LIDDY: It doesn't look like there'd be anything wrong with it, Gail. It has good ingredients.

GAIL: But if you eat that much of it.

LIDDY: She started hemorrhaging.

GAIL: Cut up her insides just like it was knives, that cabbage. You know how sharp cabbage can be.

LIDDY: She bled to death internally.

PEGGY: That's almost unbelievable.

GAIL: Well, you can believe it.

 

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