Grandma
by and published in Edition Eight of Pomegranate
Frank Sinatra would have envied your tunes after the stroke. You sat
embodied into that old wheelchair like it was a piece of you, another
root. Mother understood your stocky language and tried to talk to you
about soap-operas and how your foot feels.
The bruises, you’d point and we’d pretend to understand your secret stroke
language of DO DO DO, these bruises are killing me.
Mom would laugh like you told a story, like you said,
I got this one playing racquetball with the other women. Shirl, across the
hall got smacked in the face and they had to take her to another hospital,
damn it all. All I got was this stinkin’ bruise and this old bed again.
If I knew grandpa before he died, he might say that you had a beautiful
singing voice. He called you little bird, my childhood nickname.
Wrapping his arms around your backside in the kitchen, grabbing your small
ass and claiming, “It can’t be jam, ‘cause it shakes like jelly.” I was
born with that round ass. Planted in that chair, yours sits.
Do Do Do Do Do, you say in that new stroke accent. And mother shakes her
head.
“How do you even know what she’s talking about,” I want to scream for you,
for your useless voice box and concrete throat. “She wants to pee on her
own and shower freely and for Gods sakes, talk to her husband in the
kitchen!”
I stay next to your bed pan trying not to grip it until my knuckles turn
that off white glare.
“Do Be Do Be Do!” I crescendo to my mother, DO BE, get Sinatra, get a
nurse, get anyone – she just wants to sing!
Cassandra Mannes
Cassandra Mannes is 21 years old and was recently published in AngelicDynamo’s May 2009 issue. She is a student at North Carolina State hoping to go onto graduate school, but is having trouble with the scabs of writing she produces. One day she hopes to write the next Harry Potter phenomenon book for young adults and call it a day.