Unpolished Gem

…you blow little things into big grotesque carnival floats that cast shadows over perfect summer afternoons.

Here I was iust nobody, really; nobody distinctive, nobody important. But here I was somebody loved for being precisely that.

After all, time was so finite, it was the only thing you couldn't buy. "You can't buy old people," my grandmother had told me the last time I visited her, "you can hand over some money and buy a little child, but you can't buy old people. So remember, Agheare, to spend your time well with your parents." Then I remembered another thing she said to me, punctuated with the deepest saddest sigh her old lungs could exhale: “But who would want to buy a useless old person like me anyway?"

Diseased with love, they called it, those who watched like hawks to note any departure from sense. They said things like, “Woe and wah, she is diseased with him very deeply,” as if the two people were rotted by love, and already melding into one contagious sticky miasma. It was a terminal illness.

She walked as if she were completely oblivious to her diminutive size. A person of such petite proportions was neant to be delicate, breakable, breathless. Yet my mother defied every law of her own physiology. Biologically she was destined to be delicate, to age into a thin, tiny woman. Yet the decades of work filled out her frame, widened her shoulders, gave her hands like cracked coal and the pounding walk like thunder.

I howled with my mouth stretched into the gaping sign of infinity.

… my grandmother was possessed of a form of magic, the magic of words that became movies in the mind. The people she spoke about came alive through her voice, her pauses, her animated eyebrows, and the distinction between reality and fantasy no longer had any force.