Page 25 - Solstice Art & Literary Magazine 2020

Grandma Mary Sue was full of stars. She shimmered with a tender and loving warmth. Her words were soft and round, and she never spoke without sincerity. But in the early spring of that same year, she died. My father and I visited her the day before she passed though, and on that day, three things happened.
The first thing to happen was routine: she was taken to the in-house salon to get her hair styled, though she was nearly bald and though the curling iron burned
off the frail white follicles. Then, as she had done every day, she applied her makeup, though
she had long ago lost her vision and though each brush threw color hap- hazardly across her face. She loved to look pretty—and she always did.
“You look beautiful,” I said. She swooned.
The second thing that happened
was ceremonial: a wiry golden man
arrived with an oversized bible to deliver her last rites. But the shapes that formed from his tongue were lightless and cold. As he preached the Litany for the Dying—of archangels, of Mary and Joseph—Mary Sue seemed only to be swallowed by the immense grey of her own demise. She did not need to ruminate on something that was already so clear to her. She needed only to be happy. When the preacher left, she would not hear a single “I’m sorry”.
The final thing that happened was kind: her friends came and spoke to her. Simply spoke to her. They spoke plainly of life, not acknowledging that it might ever end, and they laughed together. She loved them just the same as they loved her, and as they huddled around the bed it was understood, without the pomp and circumstance of it all, that she would be missed.
My grandma was a mythological beauty, and no word of Styx should change that. “I love you,” I told her as we left. And I knew, finally, the cure for death.
⁂
Ava took the same path home as me. Her sadness still seemed foreign. Being sad for her had solved nothing. But I decided I didn’t need to be sad for her anymore.
Some nine days after Ava returned to
school, it began to rain. It was a stern, disciplinarian rain that slapped you sideways across
the face and pecked at your ankles like a dozen hungry birds. When I saw she didn’t have an umbrella, I offered to share mine. So we walked home together and were subjected to the earth’s cruel regimen. Still, she was blue. Still, she was alone. It would not be this act of courtesy that would change her mood; instead, it would take a spontaneous moment of humanity shared in the driving rain: the umbrella broke. We gasped and recoiled as the
rain berated us, drenched our clothes and skin. A pause. We were stupefied. Breathless, we looked at one another, and suddenly, violently began to laugh. We were power- less against the rain, so we laughed high and round and frolicked down the sidewalk. We stomped in puddles and surfed down torrents, careless towards all the world. It was pure and thoughtless, and Ava was again my friend. We grinned. The street danced beneath our feet.
I had no words for the eggshell girl. She seemed happy without them.
Ava was, for those moments, not so heartsick. Perhaps it was the first time she hadn’t thought of her sister—the first time no one was there to remind her of her sister.There was no sympathy to amplify the magnitude of her grief. There was just a person. There was just kindness, to quell death.
“When she walked home after that first week, she nearly washed away
in the rain.”
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