Bob Haugen
MY GRANDMA
Grandma
is
crabbed hands.
"This way, Grandma." I am helping her jump across the living
room rug. Her right hand is crabbing that looney poker, her left the
hot air. The hot air smells like Grandma who
is
dying, like the dead
snake cane she's pokering pokering into the rug that smells like her.
"This way, Grandma." She jumps twice on one foot. She
is
trying to turp. to her chair.
Her chair curls up fiercely dimpled
as
her poker.
A
patterned
cushion on it smells like her.
Grandma smells like piss rotting things.
The skin stuck to Grandma's arms and legs and what shows
on
her chest before the flimsy folding dress starts is puckered up into
tiny, sharp edged wires. The wires spin out from the bottom of her
skull
for a framework, crisscrossed, whorling, millions of them. Her
skin,
the dried skin of a liquid mass,
is
sucked in between the wires
in
a million sacs.
I
can see pink through Grandma's brown stockings. Her pink
ankles
spindle up into her knees. Her wrists end in elbows. I've curled
my
fingers around her left wrist and
I
can feel dried wheat stalks
inside it.
"This way, Grandma. Supper isn't ready yet."
If
I set her at
the table now, she'll want to know why there's no food on her plate.
Grandma has a hard time balancing her swollen middle over
her skinny legs. She can't lift her feet to walk. She would upset herself.
So
she jumps, one foot at a time, without lifting her foot off the
floor.
Two inches a jump.
