Grandma Climbs
by Philip Schultz Grandma climbs a chair to yell at God for killing her only husband whose only crime was forgetting where he put things. Finally, God misplaced him. Everyone in this house is a razor, a police radio, a bulging vein. It's too late for any of us, Grandma says to the ceiling. She believes we are chosen to be disgraced and perplexed. She squints at anyone who treats her like a customer, including the toilet mirror, and twists her mouth into a deadly scheme. Late at night I run at the mirror until I disappear. The day is over before it begins, Grandma says, jerking the shade down over its once rosy eye. She keeps her husband's teeth in a matchbox, in perfumed paraffin; his silk skullcap (with its orthodox stains) in the icebox, behind Uncle's Jell-O aquarium of floating lowlifes. I know what Mrs. Einhorn said Mrs. Edels told Mr. Kook about us: God save us from having one shirt, one eye, one child. I know in order to survive. Grandma throws her shawl of exuberant birds over her bony shoulders and ladles up yet another chicken thigh out of the steaming broth of the infinite night sky. |