Grandma Eleanor lived out in Ohio, in deep woods country. For miles it was nothing but trees, a good place to spend summers as a kid. But now when I think about her, or Ohio, I can’t remember those forests anymore. I can’t remember the streams where we pulled fish out with our bare hands, and I can’t remember the trails where we’d go searching all day for Indian arrowheads, wondering what stories they held. All I remember is that upstairs room in her house where I was too afraid to go, where dad had to force me to walk in.
The first thing I noticed, the thing you couldn’t help but notice when you walked onto the porch, that hit you like a wall when you opened the front door, was the smell. It was thick and layered, heavy with the sickly sweet odors of death. I walked into Grandma’s room and had to bite my tongue to keep from gagging from it. But then I saw her, and suddenly the smell didn’t seem so bad. Not half so bad as looking on the shriveled thing that used to be my Nana, seeing its utter loneliness.
When I came in she seemed to see me, or at least to notice something, cause her eyes came all clear. She tried to sit up, failed, and then raised one bony hand toward me. I was so scared I could barely move. What did I want with that hand, with that corpse masquerading as my grandma? She stretched the hand further, me shrinking back all the while, and then a single tear formed at the corner of her eye. The sunlight through the open windows caught it, filling it with brightness, until finally it slipped down her cheek, disappearing into a small wet blotch on her pillow.
“Walker?” she whispered to me. Grandpa Walker had been dead for ten years, but dad always said I looked like him. I guess nana saw it too. “Walker, are you there?”
I took a step closer, fighting the urge to run, to forget the monster in that bed and remember Nana as she truly was, all laughter and lessons. I took a step closer and I took the hand before me. It was so thin and dry, brittle. It was a corpse’s hand, not my nana’s. But the voice was still her.
“Walker, I’m scared.”
I didn’t realize it then, but there were tears in my eyes too. I could see the fear in her, the uncertainty, and I wanted it to go away. I leaned down to my Nana and whispered into her ear the only things I could think to say. I told her what she needed to hear, and with a sigh she left that plane for good. I was crying, but there was a smile on her face, and that smile stayed there till we put the lid on her box and lowered her beneath the old elm beside her Walker.
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