the word prompt today was "align"
"...So now I need to align these two," Ashley muttered to herself.
She was fixing (attempting to fix, trying her best, if you will) one of the beds in the hospital that had collapsed.
In truth, it was more like she'd tried to take it apart to see how it worked so she understood the design better, which was what had caused it to collapse in the first place, but that was beside the point.
The current issue was holding two of the legs up at the same time to support it. The way it was built required both at the same time, so that she couldn't just fix one and then the other. Which was a reasonable design in her opinion- it made it less likely that one would break individually of the other. But the problem with that was that they were far enough apart that Ashley could not hold both poles up at the same time. She could reach well enough between the two points, but she couldn't focus on reattaching them both at once.
So, naturally, she tried anyway.
If she could figure out how to do this, that would just be so much easier, and she was almost done with this, and she really just wanted to quit messing with it and go do something else now! But she couldn't just leave it broken, especially not when she'd broken it herself on purpose.
Ashley was just resigning herself to having to leave it here and go track down someone else to help her when she heard voices in the hallway, and then Walter poked his head into the room.
"Wow, that's a mess!" Was the first thing he said, looking at where Ashley had the entire hospital bed upside down on the ground so she could work with the bottom of it more easily.
"I guess it kind of is," she conceded, blowing her hair out of her eyes. "I'm almost done though."
"Do you need help?" Walter asked, and Ashley was surprised to find herself tearing up a little. She hadn't expected this to stress her out to the degree it had, but she wanted nothing more than to just be done with it.
"Please," she said, and Walter helped.
(The benefits of actually having friends!)