Excerpt, "She Dreams of Better Times."

We could write all these things down. How grandma yelled out her hunger and pain into a bowl after grandpa died, her, shoveling the cereal flakes into her gaping mouth. “Well, I’m hungry.” Not ten minutes after he died, my mother tells me. Spoon after spoon. Flakes fell like soggy snow, pressed into the linoleum by her trampling diminutive sneaker feet, by the funeral home workers carrying out the dark body bag to their hearse. The flakes were vacuumed up later after they dried and latched on, maybe by my aunt or by my mother, eyes damp and swollen, the insides of the vacuum groaning out guttural sighs. Are we done yet, they asked us. Enough already.

Your grandma’s makeshift playroom housed many a cousin, many an aunt and uncle who didn’t mind sleeping on the floor. No skin rubbing, no blue rambler love making happened. The foundation’s cracks remained unshaken by orgasm or by earthquake. The house formed a pale postage stamp collection with the other ramblers, other elderly couples, their visiting children, their pink lawn flamingos and wind chimes. There were blow up mattresses on plush carpet, emerging from the storage unit after an annual sleep next to the croquet set. The sheets on the queen-size bed were neatly kept and smooth. The slippery pink roses on the bedspread kept tamed and clipped like manicured nails.


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Once I went through the drawers of the desk in that room. Stamps. Thumb tacks. Cuff links. All kept, but not in order. I cleared off the dust with my fingers in the yellow daylight that made its lazy way through the venetian blinds, I made dust drawings with young fingers.

If you looked down the hall you could see the slanted light, golden through the shades, telling your young brain the time of day. You can smell the warmth of the concrete despite the air conditioning. Yellowed dog-eared pages rested on the pressboard shelves, a dark oak once stylish in the seventies.

Her toenails, crooked and yellowing, remind me of how my mother’s look now. Now I cringe when the old toes are clipped. I can’t watch her being helped into her apartment—third floor, Ya-Po-Ah Terrace—by my by her caregiver Diana, by my mother and Aunt Mary. We swat at the fruit flies, hoping that killing them will give grandma more time, make her see the rotting fruit on the pocket sized counter. Make my mom not ever have to give grandma a bath, not ever.