The Becoming

Grandma was upstairs, a lump underneath the ivory bedspread. “Grandma?” The boy put a hand on the quilted mound. “Don’t you want to watch your shows.” When she did not respond, the boy peeled back the quilt. She was on her side, her gray hair a twisted knot on the pillow. Her skin was a shade of pale that looked more sickening than striking. She convulsed and the boy saw her eyes roll around behind their lids when he touched her. She snatched the blanket from his hand and pulled it over her face.

“What?” she said.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m breathing, aren’t I?”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” she said, throwing the blanket across her bed and over one of the far corners near her feet. Her legs looked hard and pale and shriveled. “I’m up now. What do you want.”

“Don’t you want to watch your shows?”

She reached over to her nightstand for a thin, gold wristwatch. “They don’t come on for another hour. Shouldn’t you be playing outside or something?” She propped herself up and put her feet on the ground. She jiggled the watch down her veiny arm and opened the drawer of the nightstand and found a soft pack of cigarettes and a lighter. The flint clicked, lighting her face a warm orange. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked, exhaling. Smoke curled out of her nostrils in twin funnels. “And if you’re going to complain about me smoking then save your ‘precious’ lungs the air. I’m 73 and I can smoke if I want to. I don’t need a little boy telling me what to do. What’s wrong with you, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

The boy dropped his head and sniffled.

Grandma inhaled deeply. “Jesus Christ.” She snubbed the cigarette in a see through tan ashtray. “Oh, come here already. She pat the empty part of the bed next to her. “I was only napping.”

She smelled of smoke, old flowers and body odor. The boy closed his eyes and buried his head in her shoulder. “When you get to be my age,” she exhaled a scratchy breath, “you start taking naps in the middle of the day. When I was young, a little older than you though, I used to think it must be miserable to have to sleep all the time-like waiting to die. But it’s not like that. It‘s nice to be able to dose off during the day, I feel very calm about it. Does that make sense? Of course it doesn’t, I hardly make much sense when I just wake up. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I enjoy having the luxury of being able to nap whenever I damn feel like it. You hear?”The boy nodded, his nose rubbed against her. She held him tighter and began to rock. ” You’re a sweet boy, you know. A pain in my ass, but a sweet boy nonetheless. Did you hear that, too?”

The boy nodded again.

“Don’t just nod like you don’t know how to talk. God gave you a voice, use it.”

“Yes, Grandma.”

“Yes, what?”

“I’m a good boy.”

Grandma was silent for a while, working something over in her mouth. She mumbled, cleared her throat and said, “Why aren’t you outside doing who knows what madness you commit while you’re out of my watch?”

“I saw someone, Mr. Aldrich saw him, too.”

“Who did you see?”

“I don’t know, he was too far away.”

“It was a man?” She moved him so they could look at each other. “How do you know that? I thought you couldn’t see them.“

“I waited around a little, I was scared.”

“What did Mr. Aldren do?”

’He went inside.”

’He left you alone with a stranger?”

“No, not really, the guy was really far away.”

“And you waited around for him?”

“Only for a little bit.”

“He’s always been a coward. That’s why he never had kids and ran off the only good woman to love him. Don’t hang around that weasel.”

“Okay.”

Grandma leaned over, momentarily squishing the boy between her body, reaching for her cigarettes. While she lit a new one, the boy moved off of her lap and stood before her dark shape, backlit by the light filtering through the window blocked by an AC unit. After she took her first inhale, she said, “what scared you so bad you had to come in?”

“He was carrying something with him.”

“Is that what scared you?”

“It was really long.” He shifted his weight onto his other foot.

“Do you have to use the bathroom?”

“No”

“Was it a rope or a hose, something like that? ”

“A rope, I think? ”

“Grandma sucked in a final time on her cigarette and stubbed it out next to the other half finished one in the ashtray. “Get my slippers,” she said.

The boy bent down and picked up a pair of fuzzy pink slippers near the bureau and set them at Grandma’s pruny toes. She hunched over. Her clothes were wrinkled and her hair pointed in every direction. She looked beyond the boy with her watery blue eyes. Thin bars of light pressed stripes into her terrycloth arms. She was framed into her position by a backdrop of boxes and papers stacked in haphazard piles all over the room. Once she had caught him trying to straighten up the mess when he knocked over a pile of documents. She’d grabbed him by the wrist and demanded him to drop everything he was holding. “I kept a clean house for my ungrateful husband for 30 years. I want this place to look like a mess so when he comes back to haunt me, which no doubt he’ll do, he can see how much I truly cared about keeping a ‘tidy house’ And before you even ask your smartass questions, the reason I do it only in my room is because I don’t want any visitors thinking we live in a pigsty. This mess is a private thing that doesn’t involve you so stay out of it.” Since then, the boy has only picked up dirty plates and wrappers when she wasn’t looking.

“Do you want help up?”

“Christ, no.” She stuck her feet in her slippers and pushed herself up with a groan. “Let’s go see this man.”