An old woman is hired to sit with a peasant's dying mother, agreeing to take a lump sum and stay as long as the mother lives. Perversely, the mother refuses to die until the old woman, losing money by the minute, employs a strategy to ease her along to heaven. Suggested by Guy de Maupassant's dark and funny story, this parable about greed introduces the Devil in its own strange way.
Published in Something In The Basement & Other Plays.