Issue 16
Toss
Dianne McKnight
Home
Welcome
Contents
Contact Us
Join Our Mailing List
What's New
Site Map
Site Search
Time Stops
Grandma was about to eat her meals-on-wheels lunch. A Styrofoam box with petrified food in it sits on the coffee table; the plastic utensils, a napkin -- it's all as clear as if she'd just left the room.
But after the stroke she never came back to this house and neither did my sister and me until today. We buried Grandma this morning. It was just us at her graveside and a pastor reading a prayer. She was 97 and everybody she'd ever known was dead.
Now we're throwing away years in minutes. The jars and lids and junk she saved so carefully her whole life long, we're tossing it all, carting it out front to the rented dumpster we spent money on instead of flowers. (It being November they'd have died anyway.)
But I'm wondering if Grandma's ghost is here, watching, wanting to tell us we ought to feel a whole lot worse than we do for getting rid of her life like this.
My sister's in the kitchen, opening cupboards. I close my eyes, picture Grandma in there, back to life, reaching for a cup and her instant coffee. I stand there awhile waiting for the stirring.
~Dianne McKnight
Dianne McKnight's flash fiction and nonfiction appear in Doorknobs and
BodyPaint, Tattoo Highway, riverbabble, flashquake, In Posse Review,
Hobart, and Mississippi Review. She lives in Vermont. Email.
© 2004 by Dianne McKnight. All Rights Reserved.
© Copyright 2004 by Cayuse Press. All Rights Reserved.