Baby Fat

Mitzi Akaha

Gramma’s in bed again and Mom says I can’t see her yet. She says this as she slams the door of the corner room I didn’t even know existed and speed walks away, not like she usually does with a walkman and jean shorts, but an angry walk, trying to escape me. She says this after I ask her why she’s so huffy, a word I hear her boyfriend Ted use all the time but know I shouldn’t use, and continuing to speed away, she screeches, “It’s all too much!” then slams another door. I just want to say hello, which should be okay seeing as how I haven’t seen Gramma in almost a year, but I guess she must be really tired.

Downstairs, my grampa Bob-Bob—a nickname my brother Luke gave him when he couldn’t separate “Gramma” from “Grampa”—is in the kitchen frying an egg as always, just one egg bubbling in a round metal barrier with a handle he bears down on until the egg is done, a perfect circle. He never flips it because he’s afraid the yolk might break, and so his breakfast is always sunny-side up on toast with a half-cup of milk on the side. “But won’t it break when you eat it?” I ask. “Sure it will,” he says. “But when it does, the toast is there to mop it up.”

I follow him to the kitchen table on the far end of the tv room where The Toledo Blade is already set up on a plastic stand. He sits and pushes down on the armrests to straighten himself up, grumbles, then settles in to his newspaper. I sit next to him and watch him pick up the toast, bite, and squint through a square magnifying glass as he reads the small print on the front page. “What’re you reading?” I ask. He twists the plastic bud in his ear and looks around, then continues peering through the lens, too absorbed in whatever’s going on today to respond.

I turn to the television sitting in a large oak stand against the wall. It’s always on mute. There’s a large, wide-smiling black man in a grey suit taking up the whole screen, and though Ted isn’t black, or fat, I think of him when I see this guy. When the black man shifts to the left I see he’s reporting the weather. Flat clouds and rain drops cover five states and the man’s tubby finger is drawing a line from the north downward as if to say the great lakes are going to attack. I look outside and reason that the black man is lying; it’s snowing.

“You know he had his stomach stapled.” Bob-Bob is hunched forward, peering at the tv. In the last few years, he’s grown this frightening hump on his back that sets his head forward like a turtle’s, and he’s even got the same loose folds of skin that hang and ripple like banners from his chin. His glasses are on now, and as he tilts his head up and down to study the weather report, he has to readjust himself every so often to fit his shell of a back into too small a chair. I wonder if it’s this routine that’s made him this way, squashed him into this unnaturally small and stooped man. “And he’s still fat,” he adds.

Outside is the Ohio River, hidden under a blanket of careless snowflakes. As I watch, more fall and settle and disappear into the sheets, quiet and submissive—a word Gramma’s used to talk about what’s wrong with Mom’s boyfriends. Trees on each side are trying to shake the cold from their branches onto the ground, but the patches close to the stems have hardened and aren’t going anywhere. Past the trees, countless pointy-roofed houses with windows for a whole wall like my gramparents’ face the river as if everyone is watching the earth freeze, though I’m sure I’m the only one. I only get to see it when I come here, which isn’t very often, but everyone who lives in it probably sees it as an inconvenience to be salted, shoveled, cleaned up.

“You think Gramma’s awake yet?” I ask. Bob-Bob is back to his paper with a half-circle of slowly bleeding egg still sitting on his plate, waiting to be finished off. My grampa hasn’t always been so quiet; in fact, my mom’s told me that he was a crazy party animal when she was a kid. And even I remember before Gramma got sick, when Bob-Bob and Gramma, with his Stoli and her smoking Chesterfields, put on dance shows for us to energetic jazz music. He’s always had his eggs, but everything else has dried up. I tap him on the shoulder to ask him again where Gramma is and he flinches in his chair, his throat flapping as his body settles back down. Probably thought I was a fly.
A pan rattling the coil stove draws my attention to the kitchen. My mom is darting back and forth from the fridge with cartons of eggs and milk and half a chicken bound to a cheap Styrofoam board, spying on me every time she’s facing my direction. Once everything’s set up she leans on the counter between the kitchen and tv room. “Have you seen your brother this morning?” she shouts. I haven’t. “Go wake him up for me, would you?”

I say sure and turn back to the tv.

“Lucy,” she continues. “If you can help it, try to sit up so you don’t turn out like your grandpa, huh?”

I wait for him to defend himself but he says nothing.

I leave my grampa to his studies and hurtle up the curved stairs, stopping short of the door to the room my brother Luke and I share when we’re in town. Though we haven’t been here for almost a year, since Peter, or Peter-the-Grave, as Mom likes us to call him, threw all of Mom’s stuff out on the lawn, I know I can depend on the fact that when I enter this room, it’ll be trimmed with the same pinks and blues as always, with two separate beds the same green color as the dead trout above our, or now Peter-the-Grave’s, fireplace, and a crib against the far window that’s been waiting there, just in case, though I haven’t needed it for almost eight years now. Everything in this house speaks of Gramma’s taste—lavenders and fresh floral towels and bed sheets pulled tight and smooth like the queen Luke and I shared at Best Western until Mom decided it was time to go to Ohio. But here, everything smells less like soap and more like flowers.
Our room, which I shouldn’t be calling “ours” because Mom says referring to any place or thing as “mine” is dangerous, is nestled up against Gramma’s craft room where everything too bright for the rest of the house—long yellow couches, vinyl chairs and paintings by great aunts I never met—lines the walls, and knickknacks crowd the closet waiting to be become purses and slippers. Even that room with all its clutter is usually tidy. But from the way it looks now, boxes of photos open and littered across the floor among dull, open scissors and half-cut dress patterns and withering tubes of paint, Gramma hasn’t made anything recently. It’s unlike her to leave things like this.
I’m still at the top of the stairs trying to find excuses to not go into my room and wake my brother, a violent toss-and-turner whose scheming against me doesn’t sleep even when he does. Sometimes I’m willing to believe that he really was asleep all the times he drew on my face with permanent marker, as he explained it to Mom, but that doesn’t make it any easier to scrub off. I turn to the right, and at the end of the hall, on the opposite side of the craft room from our room, is Gramma and Bob-Bob’s room. The door is cracked open and inviting me inside, so I choose the quiet safety of my gramma, a lady who would protect me from anything, even when Mom isn’t willing.

I fall to my hands and knees and lift and drop them with my breath as I crawl down the hallway. When the top of my head reaches the door, I take hold of the edge and thrust it open quickly, knowing it’ll creak less that way. The light through the window is glaring and throws light on the dust flying through the air while everything else looks pure white. I slowly stand with a hand above my eyes like a visor and prowl in on my toes toward the bed.

Two pillows, corners overlapping, are resting casually against the broad headboard, kind of like Mom and Ted on a good day. Tangled white sheets toward the end of the bed look like they’re trying to rescue a heavier blue blanket from falling to the floor, and one dirtier white sheet covers the whole mattress. She must be in there somewhere. I think back on a time I had the flu and couldn’t eat for four days, thinking Gramma must be even skinnier than I am, at this point. I approach the side of the bed, close enough to really inspect it, then bring my face as close to the sheets as I can without touching them. There are no defined curves to suggest a person sleeping there, but where else could she be? So I point my finger in front of me and slowly bend forward, and forward, until the edge of my fingernail feels through the sheet to the bare mattress. Flat and lifeless.

My whole body shakes like those wintry branches outside, trying to cast off the cold feeling, but it only gets colder. Not knowing what to do, I dart out of the room and to the concealed warmth of my sleeping brother. Even the most heartless bully can’t ignore his panicking sister.

I throw the door open, panting and scared, crying, “Gramma’s dead, she’s not in the house anymore!” But my brother keeps his eyes closed and chooses not to listen. I climb over my bed to his and shake his shoulders, shouting, “Luke! Gramma’s dead! She is dead!” And finally he’s at least rolling over and mumbling, “What? Why are you yelling?”
“Wake up!” I protest, and I push him out of bed and onto the floor, continuing to shout. “Someone took her away!”

He stands up promptly then, marches over to me and slaps me in the face without explanation. My cheek swells with heat that makes me cry and run out of the room, down the stairs and to my mother who is in the kitchen, now slicing and pinching the white slivers of fat from a chicken breast. My brother follows close behind me and starts yelling before I have the chance to say anything: “Lucy pushed me off the bed!”

“He wouldn’t listen to me!” I argue.

Meanwhile, my mom continues to cut the chicken, tilting her head back and forth as a gesture that she’s listening.

I sneak back behind her and hug her so that my face is in her bottom and I say, “Gramma’s dead, Mom.”

She turns around and hovers over me. “Yell a little louder and she might wish she were.”
Her legs shake me off and I collapse onto the floor behind her. “She isn’t dead?” I ask.
“I don’t think Grandma would pick right now to die, Lu. I’m sure she’s fine.” As she speaks, white lumps of fat slip from her fingers into the sink and go jiggling down the pipes.

“She can choose when to die?” I want to know.

“The point is, she’s fine, and you’re getting in the way of the sink.” Continuing to throw useless chicken pieces over my head, she nudges me with her foot and tells me not to push Luke anymore, without ever telling Luke that he shouldn’t slap me in the face.
Luke grabs a piece of white bread from the counter and breaks pieces into his mouth as he walks away, and Mom tells him not to ruin his appetite because we’re eating dinner soon.

“But it’s only,” checking the clock on the microwave, “one thirty-seven.”

“Well, a lot’s changed since the last time we came here, so just, be hungry in a couple hours, would you? For me?”

He nods submissively, the golden child who would apologize to Mom for breathing before asking her for anything. Even when she asked us what we wanted for Christmas, he said nothing and later denied having the wish list I saw him making a few days before. And when I asked why he lied he told me that it’s because he and I don’t need anything on account of Mom losing everything. I didn’t understand what he meant by that, probably because it was when we were staying at the Best Western, which sure looked like a place for people who had something. But according to Luke, we weren’t paying for it, Ted was, though neither of us understood why he wasn’t staying with us.
He asks Mom if she needs any help and when she says she can handle it, he goes back upstairs, probably to sleep more. The hours he spends up there alone make me think he’d rather not have a family at all. Left to myself, I check the safety of my exit—Mom cutting chicken, Bob-Bob still slumped with the magnifying glass—and set off to find Gramma.

I’ve already covered the rooms upstairs, which means she must be on this floor somewhere. There’s a bedroom in the middle of the hallway where my mom is staying, but Gramma can’t be in there because, as Mom says, coming here is hard enough without having Gramma breathing down her back and suffocating her. So I sneak out of the kitchen into the tv room, then quickly turn a corner into the dining room.
I make one loop around the long and smudge-less glass table with six pink-padded chairs neatly tucked in around it, then I linger in front of a tall china cabinet filled with chipped Hummel figurines and framed black and white photos of a smiling little girl next to a swing, hand in hand with an older man, and her again, hanging from a hat rack. Until now, I’ve only assumed I’ve seen a hat rack, but seeing it now, I realize I’ve never actually seen one in real life. It’s just not something we use. I let my eyes blur and stare at my reflection in the glass for ten seconds until it’s safe to move on.

The next room over, continuing away from the tv room, is the family room—a pair of embroidered blue and white floral couches with sloping arms, a framed painting of a beagle or some other hunting dog chasing after stupid ducks who’re flying too low, a glossy, dark wood piano that wears no sign of recent visitors. On top of the piano is a photograph, unframed and frosted with fingerprints, of me and my brother sitting on either side of Gramma on the piano bench. Her slender hands are raised above the keys and all of us are smiling in this delicate way, as if she’s playing some beautifully sad song. And I’m smiling in the same way right now, unable to pull my cheeks up into a full grin because something might break. I want to take it to show Luke, as proof that there was a time we got along, but it’s useless.

As I enter the hallway, I hear my mom’s voice throwing itself between the kitchen and tv room, and Bob-Bob’s is echoing back quietly. The words sound like fuzz from here but tell me they’re distracted, so I keep walking, steps and breath quiet, peeking into Mom’s room where Gramma is not, then around the stairs to the door in the corner that my mom slammed earlier.

I don’t knock, afraid of the sound it will make, just crack the door open enough to slip into the dark room with a low bed planted in the middle.

“Gramma?” I whisper. “Are you in there?”

It’s too dark to see anything but the bedposts lit up by a lamp in the hallway, and though I can make out the stack of blankets laid out on top, for all I know, I’m talking to no one. But the fear of finding a second bed empty keeps me from moving closer.
I walk around to the other side of the bed and pull a rocking chair forward to watch from. As my eyes adjust, I see a large grey box, about my height, sitting on the floor next to me, its front covered with knobs and cords and wires. Two long straws from the box run through the sheets as if to suck them dry. Two of the knobs are turned to “on.” A sack of clear liquid hangs from a hook on the machine’s side, and when I poke it, its contents sway like river water lapping against its banks.

“Gramma, it’s Lucy,” I repeat. Nothing. I lean back and a loud creak leaks out from the bottom of the chair, spreading across the floor as a muffled groan. I never noticed how quiet this house is without her company until now, when even she is too withdrawn under her layers of heavy wool blankets and quilts to speak.

I figure that she’ll have to wake up eventually so I sit and wait a few minutes. I ask if she heard me yelling in the kitchen and decided to die, and though she doesn’t respond, I think I know Gramma well enough to know she wouldn’t do that. But I’m getting restless. Hugging my knees into my chest, I start counting to one hundred, which is how long I’ll last before I explode with anxiousness like a pricked balloon, or like Luke’s acne pimples that blot out parts of the mirror—and who will clean me up?

A clanging noise carries itself from the kitchen to my ears, and then a muffled, “Dad,” and shuffling feet follow. And then louder, “Dad!” in my mom’s voice accompanied by a low grumble and a chair leg scraping against hardwood floor, and then footsteps, dense and drawn out, come toward the corner of the house.

There’s a knock on the door and before anyone can respond, the lights are on and I’m curled up with my head between my knees on the rocking chair next to the bed, next to Gramma. I jump out of my chair and hurry to the door, moving just for the sake of moving, and also to make it look like I never intended to be in that room, where I shouldn’t be. But Bob-Bob, by the way he is standing casually against the doorframe, doesn’t seem to mind.

Before I make it past him, a shaky tone emerges from behind me. I turn my head back and see Gramma in bed, lifted up high on a mound of pillows, her chin and nostrils peeking over the comforter. I scurry to the opposite side of Bob-Bob to watch from between his legs, oddly frightened of the body on the bed. She lifts her head and peers over straws up her nose, and I guess that the box I saw must be drinking her.
My grampa steps forward and leans on a bedpost, running a hand over his thin grey strip of hair. “Marion,” he starts. “Can you make it to dinner?”

Her eyes pan down and stop on me. “Well, hello,” she says, happy to see me.

“Hi,” I say. And suddenly I’m not invisible anymore.

“It’s about time you came to see me,” she musters, and begins to cough. She talks like a rusty instrument or a song that hasn’t been practiced in a long time.

Bob-Bob is turning his finger around in his ear, asking her to repeat what she said.

“Nothing you need to worry about, I was just talking to Lucy.”

“How was your nap?” I ask.

She lets out a deep laugh like an old man’s and coughs again. “Sweet of you to ask.”
On a nightstand next to her bed is an army of medicine bottles, some orange with white labels, or all white, others dark, thick glass. And littered all over and around these are wiry gray strands in loose curls like Gramma’s, spun and coiled like thread that’s been shed from its spool. On the ground below is more gray, some in large clumps while others have lodged themselves like pins in the carpet.

Gramma is looking up at Bob-Bob the way my mom sometimes pouts when she wants to kiss and make up, though I don’t know what Gramma’s done wrong.

Bob-Bob clears his throat. “Take your medicine today?”

Gramma’s chin lifts and drops to answer yes.

Bob-Bob nods and grumbles. Gramma’s head falls to the side, toward the closed window. I want to tell her about the snow that’s falling right outside, how it’s beautiful and seems like it will never end. But I look at the machine instead that’s slowly rumbling from the inside, and at its straws that send a sputtering sound through Gramma’s nose and out her mouth. I replay an image from a year ago of me and Gramma in the snow; I’m digging my hands into it to see if I can fit my whole arm in, and Gramma, she should be burrowing right beside me. But when I turn, that bed is there next me with Gramma buried in it, straws up her nose, her tired breath leaking from her throat and hovering in the cold over her open mouth like tiny clouds.

Bob-Bob is fidgeting with his earpiece again, asking Gramma if she said something. I want to tell him no, that’s just her trying to breathe, but would rather not have to see his reaction. So I quickly tell them goodbye, I’ll see you at dinner, and dash up the stairs to my brother who won’t ask where I’ve been.

Luke’s sitting on the bed, hair wet, his body bent forward as he lifts his legs into his pants. He doesn’t even notice that I’ve come in, and it’s so unbearably quiet that all I can think to do is hit him or pester him somehow. Sitting on the bed next to him is a pair of fresh, white socks rolled up into a ball, the perfect weapon, so I steal them away, take a few quick steps back, and throw them at the side of his head. He’s still struggling to get his pants up when he chases after me with the socks, down the stairs and into the tv room where we duck behind tables and chairs shooting each other. The last time we did this, we played with a stuffed bear holding a heart that Mom’s last boyfriend Peter got her for Valentine’s Day, and Peter even played, too. But now, it actually hurts.
My mom is watching us from the kitchen with a pained look on her face, but she isn’t trying to stop us; in fact, she hardly reacts when I knock the ball onto the kitchen counter. She just tosses it back over and continues to stare in our direction, as if she has more important things to worry about.

A few minutes in, I realize that the game isn’t fun anymore. When I get a hold of the socks again, I unroll them and hand them to Luke, game over, and when he sits to put one on, I take the seat in front of him to watch television.

A busty woman with heavy blue eyeshadow is waving her flabby arms around, trying to get the attention of a pale fat man in a tight suit, and they look like they might be brother and sister. The fat man approaches her, says something, then turns to walk away, leaving the busty woman fuming. Then she slaps him in the face, and I wonder if Luke and I will still be fighting when we’re grownups.

I’m about to ask Luke if he saw what happened on tv when I’m jerked back by a thick sock over my mouth, my brother laughing wildly behind me, and though I don’t want to fight him anymore, I throw an open hand over my head to get him to let go. He goes staggering into the kitchen and I follow him with the sock in my fist, ready to finally get Mom on my side, but Luke’s already tugging on her shirt saying, “Look, see, Lucy has it.”
“No I don’t!” I cry, dropping the sock on the floor before I enter the kitchen. I lift my spread hands into the air and exclaim, “See! I don’t have it!”

“Stop yelling and go put it away,” she says to both of us.

“But he choked me,” I explain.

“I don’t care who tried to kill who,” she asserts. “Just go put them away before Grandma and Grandpa see the mess you made in their house.”

She taps both of us as a motion to leave, so we do, walking directly to the sock.

“Pick it up,” Luke says.

“Me?” I huff and start to walk away, thinking he’ll do it as long as I’m not there to watch him surrender. I sit down to watch tv. When I turn back, the sock is still there, but Luke isn’t. I lean back and watch the fat people’s cheeks shake as they talk, wondering if Bob-Bob would call them fat, too.

Mom’s already forgotten about the sock war and is standing by the oven, twitchy and anxious, watching the timer count down to dinner time. It’s odd watching her cook. At home, it’s always Ted, or before him, Peter, preparing everything while Mom complains about how she hates eating it as leftovers from old salsa and sour cream containers when he’s too busy to cook again the next day. But because Gramma is sick, the task of cooking family dinner has been passed to my mom who doesn’t seem to be enjoying it at all.

Through the window, the fallen snow has cemented itself to the river, now a slick stretch of ice like polished tile. It’s hard to see what the surface looks like because it’s reflecting the glow of the falling sun, a blanket of thin, silvery fog covering everything.
I stare blankly at the ridge of wall that hangs between the kitchen and tv room, above the lone sock resting on the smooth hardwood floor. On the opposite end of the kitchen, a large brown sphere pokes into the light, followed by two brown posts shuffling backwards, then a blue and white plaid shirt bent over a metal chair, and soon Bob-Bob is in the kitchen pulling Gramma on wheels. He continues rolling her until he gets to the island where he stops and jerks his arms back repeatedly. “Marion, either you walk or we go around the other way.”

“Good morning, Mom,” my mom says, flicking a spatula.

Gramma turns her head back to whisper, “Julie’s cooking?” so only Bob-Bob can hear, though he probably can’t, then turns back to my mom and says, “Hi dear, how’s dinner coming?”

“Oh, fine. How was your nap?” she replies.

Gramma motions for Bob-Bob to push her to the oven, which he does, and she asks, “May I take a look?” She lifts her arm, fixes her hand around the handle on the oven door, and yanks at it until she nearly throws herself to the floor. Embarrassed, she explains that her arms just aren’t what they used to be and has Bob-Bob pull her away.
Mom hasn’t moved from her spot in front of the timer, but is now slumped against the counter groping the base of her ring finger as if she lost something. My grampa pushes Gramma back the way they came and disappears into the dark, the wheels grinding on the floor steadily working their way through the hallway. A quick pitter-patter drowns out the rolling wheelchair and my brother shouts “Hi Gramma!” as he runs to the tv room, taking a seat right next to me.

“Where did you go?” I ask. He sticks his tongue out at me, as if that’s the only way he knows how to communicate anymore.

Mom calls for him to get the casserole and he stands immediately, racing to the kitchen like he’s been waiting to tell her about some other bad thing I did. But he dutifully returns to the table with a deep glass dish filled with oranges and greens, sets it on the table with a knife and some napkins, then sits back down.

“Mom wants you in the kitchen,” he says.

“What’d you tell her?” I prod, not that there’s anything to say.

My mom is pulling plates out of the cupboard and silverware out of drawers. “Bring these to the table,” she says.

“That’s all?”

She adds salt and pepper shakers to the stack and sends me on my way. I pass Gramma and Bob-Bob who are just reaching the tv room and walk to the table. When I sit down, my brother sneers and puffs “h’m!,” then looks away at Gramma who, without the shield of sheets for the first time since we arrived, looks yellow, swollen, and twice her normal size. She is a shingly cavern, decaying in the center, its entrance and minor cracks and holes plugged up with fat. So much fat. Were she not with Bob-Bob, I wouldn’t have believed it was Gramma, not in a million years. Her arms, like tree trunks, lie heavily on the armrests, and in her right hand is a metal stand on wheels carrying the bag of clear fluid from that grey box next to her bed. A straw from the base of the bag is taped to her inner arm.

A few steps from the table, Gramma says she wants to go to the kitchen to help Mom. Bob-Bob rolls his head and my mom, having heard Gramma’s intention, yells a drawn out, “I’ve got it!” But Gramma insists on checking on things, so grabbing Bob-Bob’s arm for support, she tugs on him and stands, shakes his arm from hers, and does an eight-point turn to put her in the direction of the kitchen. Then she begins to move her feet forward as invisibly as someone doing the moonwalk, though not in that slick and polished way. She is moving far too slowly, each step the length of a life.

Bob-Bob plops into his chair as Gramma’s passing the two foot mark. He’s wearing his glasses so thick and fogged up that I can barely see his eyes, but I can tell he’s looking at me. Luke is checking out a thin lady with big boobs and long, dark hair like my mom’s selling some cleaning product on tv.

“Sorry for going in there,” I say to Bob-Bob, vaguely, so Luke won’t understand what I mean.

Bob-Bob shakily leans forward, thrusting his head even more forward, and cups a hand by his ear. “What?”

“How’s Gramma,” I shout.

He retreats and sighs. “Better now that you’re here.”

When Gramma’s reached seven feet, my mom’s already coming into the tv room with a salad. She walks right past Gramma whose eyes are fixed on the hardwood, and she sits down across from me. Luke, still watching the saleslady, asks why the tv is always on mute.

“Grandpa can’t hear it anyway,” Mom says. “Imagine how annoyed you’d be having crackling noises going on in your ears all the time.”

Luke tries to make a joke about how I’m like the crackling noise, always talking when no one wants to listen.

“At least I don’t drool over girls who look like Mom,” I say.

Expecting to be slapped, I instinctively tense all the muscles in my face so that when I am, it won’t hurt as much. But when my eyes close, I hear a loud thud like a loose boulder crashing to the ground.

I open my eyes and see Gramma’s whale of a body flopped on the hardwood floor, her stomach spread like spilled jelly. Other than one arm lain across her belly, every part of her body is on the floor. Not even the small of her back was saved. She never screams or asks for help. She just stares at the ceiling wondering if anyone has noticed that she’s on the ground, where she shouldn’t be. She’s asking herself why no one will withdraw themselves from their own petty issues, the tv no one can hear and the table Bob-Bob devotes himself to, to see her. She closes her eyes. Thick, yolky blood slides across the arm on her stomach, drops and spreads through the threads of her t-shirt, as quiet as the snow outside.

I look back to see if anyone has noticed the spill and Luke, Mom and Bob-Bob are all staring at Gramma in their own ways. I stand first and slowly creep over to her. With my hands on my knees, I bend forward and find Luke standing next to me, assuming the same position. A deep gash runs through the middle of her forearm and a two inch slab of thick skin dangles from its base. It’s not the blood that makes me shiver, but the wispy hairs dancing on her limp flesh. I’m afraid of approaching something that can as easily be dead as it is alive. I look up and see blood streaked on the edge of the counter, knowing she must’ve sliced it there.

Luke bends down like he’s going to try repairing the wound, but digs under Gramma’s underarm fat instead, groping around for something.

“You’re going to hurt her!” I say.

He lifts his arm in front of me and in his hand, in that same hand that strangled me, is the sock. We look at each other, knowing Mom will kill us for killing Gramma, but Luke doesn’t try passing it off to me. He holds it at his side, and when Mom comes over, she screams at him and slaps him in the face. Gramma opens her eyes then and assures everyone she hasn’t died yet, but could you please keep it down.

Bob-Bob is trudging, turtle-paced, toward Gramma, tears running like a curtain from his glasses, in the folds under his eyes, down the sides of his nose, around his mouth. He kneels by Gramma’s side and runs a hand over her hairless head, then over the hills and dips on her stomach. “I wish I could hear you,” he says.