Everything Eats Everything
Grandma is usually quiet. She forgets names, dates, places, but she has moments of lucidity. She says she’s become a bird. She says they are cutting down all the trees, and she can’t find her way back. I ask her what kind of bird, and she says a Northern Parula. She winters in Florida, the Lesser Antilles. Her plumage is yellow and gray. She eats spiders, damselflies, and aphids.
Grandma says my parents are stodgy Puritans. She says the universe incarnates and plays games with itself: hide-and-seek, cat-and-mouse, camouflage-and-torture-yourself-as-religious-folk. Like beetles trying to emerge from water lilies before being eaten by hawks, or crabs trying to evade Komodo dragons, everything eats everything.
On Grandma’s birthday, Mom makes a cake. We stick wax candles in the icing. Grandma says she’s going to the Everglades. Everyone thinks she’s having a memory lapse. Mom says it’s probably a UTI and gives her D-Mannose with cranberry juice.
***
In health class, they play a video of our reproductive anatomy. There are ovaries,
tubes, and blood. I am sad to find out I am going to bleed for half my life. It feels unbelievable and unreal. Bodies smell and they are fleshy and weird to look at. If I was a frog, I’d be attracted to other frogs. I laugh when I see incandescent beetle-lovers on anise hyssop.
Sometimes I hang out with Grandma. She worked for the Department of Conservation. She says the woods on the side of the highway are deceptive strips that block our view of industry.
Grandma says disease thrives when biomes are felled.
I ask what a biome is.
“A large naturally occurring community of flora and fauna,” she replies.
***
My sister says when you stop menstruating, your bones hollow out so you can fly.
“It’s not all bad,” she says, sucking on a Bomb Pop.
Popsicle melts down my hand. I lick my wrist, which tastes of salt and runny cherry.
My sister says Grandma flies at night because they used to burn women for indecent levitation.
“Have you wondered why witches are always old ladies on brooms?” she asks.
I say I don’t believe her.
She says see for yourself.
Grandma lives in an apartment attached to our house. The lights are usually dim as she shuffles around. Even in the daylight she keeps it dark. She builds puzzles of butterflies and birds. Her apartment smells like boiled vegetables.
At eleven, I get out of bed and wait around Grandma’s apartment. The door creaks. Grandma shuffles out. I follow her into the night, trying not to make a sound. Her white nightgown billows in the moonlight. She stands in the field before our house and starts to float.
***
On my birthday I get ten candles. I blow them out. My brother gives me a rat from his research lab, which he says wasn’t a good test subject. I name the rat Edgar. Edgar’s head is split open, and he has electrodes on his brain. My brother says Edgar is drugged and not suffering. Edgar lives a while, then dies. I cry as I dig the hole.
Later, Grandma says watch out for psychos. She says unhealthy people don’t understand boundaries, which is why the world is dying. All the boundaries are messed up.
Boundaries, rules, laws. You’re supposed to follow the rules. Otherwise, you’ll drown or burn to death. I imagine floating into the ozone layer and shriveling up in outer space. I worry about getting old. Every day when I look in the mirror my face is different. Things are always changing. It’s hard to keep track of. I wonder if I’ll accomplish things. I don’t know what I want to accomplish, but I imagine it will feel satisfactory, like the grades I get in school.
***
On a different night, Grandma stands in the field. I follow her. The wind is blowing. I can hear crickets and grass as Gemini shines down. The sky is purple and black and wispy with clouds. Grandma’s white hair curls. Her face is creased like locust bark.
She says, “Do you ever wonder why everything just works in your life? Some people, everything in their life doesn’t work. It’s one big dysfunction after the next, malfunctioning electronics, parking tickets, which is why you need to be nice. Some people are being persecuted by shadows.”
A field mouse runs through a thicket.
Grandma tells me that sometimes you want to say things, like standing on a beach as the sun sets and the waves crash, but the moment passes and ten years go by and you look back at the nostalgia of the nostalgia you said you would have in that moment, walking down the street with your friend before you changed and became different people. Sometimes you don’t say things because they will send your life barreling in another direction, but maybe if you said what you wanted to, the world wouldn’t be so disastrous. Or maybe, all the people who do as they please should just not.
She hands me a list of life advice:
Your memory is an eroding seashore.
Barren maples look like nervous systems.
Anhedonia is a chemical imbalance.
If you resist everything, you will turn to stone.
Try to sort the puzzle.
I fold the list. My eyes are wet. Grandma rises up, and up and up, and suddenly I see there are other grandmas floating around. They look like stars with their white night robes. I get the feeling my Grandma is not coming back. She’s going to Florida, the Everglades, and when she’s done with the Everglades, she’ll become algae, and then land vegetation, like a fern, or a Great Basin bristlecone pine.
Gabrielle Griffis (@ggriffiss) is a mutli-media artist, writer, and musician. Her fiction has been published in or is forthcoming from Wigleaf, Okay Donkey, Monkeybicycle, Gone Lawn, XRAY Literary Magazine, decomP, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. She works as a librarian on Cape Cod. Learn more at gabriellegriffis.com.