temporary_inherited_grandmother raze i found out she died earlier this month. my stepfather's mother. she was seventy-nine. the number stunned me. it means she was only in her fifties when i was a kid spending time at her house in the mornings before school, catching the bus about a block away, and then getting dropped off there at the end of the day. she always looked ancient to me. it's an odd thing, trying to figure out what you feel — if anything — about the death of someone who never stirred up any good feelings for you while they were alive. she was never a kind person. not to me, at least. she became a bully when it suited her, just like the rest of them. it was all about tearing you down. never about building you up. if she caught me stealing a look at my reflection while walking past her china cabinet, she would always say, "conceit is a sin." it was clear she meant it as a threat. as if looking at myself for a moment meant i loved myself, and loving myself was a sin that would send me straight to hell. all she really is to me is a pile of memories, most of which have no emotions attached to them. she would stash cookies that had passed their best-by date in the fridge to squeeze more life out of them. to get anywhere with those things you had to bite into them with your molars. i remember orange tang. cereal and toast with butter in the morning. sometimes oatmeal. sitting on the radiator in the winter to warm my ass up. panda, her cat, who was about as much fun to be around as her owner. try to pet her and she'd hiss and try to take your head off. interesting dreams on the couch (white t-shirt, getting shot with a squirt gun but needing chest compressions to revive me, a strange animated segue), and a spare room upstairs (powerful emotion stirred up by figures as disparate as my grandfather and barney the dinosaur), and her daughter's bedroom (trying to kiss the girl from "wonder years" and having every attempt interrupted by the loss of visual information and a loud zipping sound). throwing one of my sister's stuffed animals — a whale not much bigger than your fist — up in the air over and over again, catching it each time, until i misjudged how much i put into it and watched, horrified, as the innocent-looking little plush thing somehow knocked a chandelier it barely touched from the ceiling and broken glass flew all over the kitchen floor. for some reason she wasn't mad about that. throwing lawn darts back and forth with my stepfather until he socked me in the face with one and made me look like a blowfish for the rest of the day. pressing a washcloth filled with ice to my jaw inside. picking gooseberries and raspberries, eating the raspberries with vanilla ice cream after cleaning them in the sink. nothing in the world tasted better than that. nothing. her vast expanse of a backyard, which seemed to go on forever. the ditch, its liquid topped with a thick, ominous green film. whenever i threw a stone or a twig in there i expected it to start smoking. mint leaves. old nudie calendars one of her sons put up in the garage and never took down. i never saw so many fake sets of breasts in my life. they did nothing for me. the red plastic swing tied to a tree, meant for a child. the tire swing, tied to another tree, meant for anyone. sheeba and bud, the black labs, mother and son. the blood left behind by hungry flies biting into the back of bud's neck in the last year of his life. he seemed indifferent, too tired to try and shake them off. haircuts i didn't ask for and didn't want (the daughter again, using me as her guinea pig when she was studying to become a hairdresser). watching "gilligan's island" and "reading rainbow" on the old television. spending summers in that house bored out of my mind, searching for something to sustain me in a cardboard box full of old books in a closet. once in a while an interesting relic would reveal itself, hidden beneath a mixed bag of children's books. thomas p. kelley's book about the black donnellys turned up one day — more pulp fiction than true canadian history, but i ate it up anyway. a collection of "MAD" magazine comics from the 1970s surfaced another day. and there was a batman comic. issue 312, from june 1979, sticking out like a sore thumb and then some. it says something that she isn't in most of these snapshots. there was no affection. no bonding. i don't remember ever having any meaningful conversations with her about anything. she was just ... there. and now she's not. 180923 ... raze every once in a while a random memory of something i did or saw or thought in her house will resurface. sitting in her front foyer, staring at some small piece of taxidermy that didn't look like any animal i knew. it was hard as bone and wrapped in soft brown fur. it looked like the wing of a flightless bird that didn't exist anymore. or: lifting a seashell to my ear thinking i might hear the sea. i never heard much of anything. i still dream about her house. sometimes she's in it. in one of these dreams, i was trying to get to sleep on her bathroom floor. i couldn't tell if it was late at night or early in the morning. there was a nightlight plugged into the wall, giving everything an eerie amber glow. the bathroom door was open. i could see the stairs that led up to the master bedroom. i could see a bit of the kitchen. i didn't know if the light out there was daylight filtering into the house or runoff from the nightlight. i could feel that i'd slept here before. more than once. sometimes i was alone. other times she was right there. i watched a memory of her walking through the house. her hair was cropped short. she didn't see me. i didn't have a blanket. i was still wearing my clothes. all i had for a pillow was a rolled up shirt. i felt the back of my neck. there was more of a curve than i was used to feeling. a side effect of sleeping on the floor and having to curl into a fetal position to relax my body, i thought. sometimes i heard noises. i wasn't sure what they were. i imagined an adolescent boy with a face too old for his body standing at the front door, smiling. i got up. i walked into the dining room and looked through the window above the radiator. thunder. wind. that was what i was hearing. there were a few blue-grey vans in the driveway. i didn't recognize them. they looked too big to me. i couldn't understand how the house could be empty when there were vans parked in the driveway. i stood there a while. every time i heard the thunder rumble, i turned back to the window. i waited to see lightning. i knew i couldn't rest until i saw it flash at least once. the lightning would tell me everything was all right. there was no lightning. i could hear rain falling, but i couldn't see it. maybe it was the wind playing tricks on me. it wasn't dark enough for a storm. back to the bathroom. i got down on the floor again. i heard what sounded like talking. i looked up and saw someone standing just inside the entrance to the hall outside the bathroom, facing the stairs. it looked like the man-child i imagined standing at the front door. he was wearing a red spring jacket. the nightlight made it the colour of rust. he wasn't talking to me. he was talking to someone who wasn't there. i couldn't hear anything he said. only the soft murmur of his voice. i looked again. he was gone. i started thinking he was going to come in here and leer at me. i imagined it happening. i imagined him standing inside the bathroom door and smiling. the waiting made me sick with anxiety. i woke up with a gasp. i fell back asleep. i woke up on the bathroom floor in the same dream i'd just abandoned. i knew what time it was now. it was a little after four in the morning. i farted. one of those lazy, slow farts. i could feel it turning into something more before i could do anything to stop it. i saw my grey underwear in a quick closeup, but only from the outside. i felt the shit slide out of me, smooth and sluggish. it wasn't wet. it didn't break off. but i felt it there. it was humiliating. i knew the second i clenched my ass cheeks it was going to be a disaster. if i tried to clean myself up, someone would walk in and catch me in the act. i was sure of it. someone stepped into the bathroom. i looked up. it was my mother. she stood where i imagined the man-child standing. her hair was brown and feathered, the way it was before she married my stepfather. she smiled at me. it wasn't a threatening smile, but something in it wasn't right. it was like the man-child's smile. i woke up with a gasp again. i fell bask asleep. i woke into the same dream, on the same bathroom floor. my mother was gone. my body was clean. i stood up. i wanted to know if there was anyone else in the house. i didn't want to be afraid anymore. i looked in one of the bedrooms on the main floor. the sheets were so bunched up i couldn't tell if anyone was under them. a strange weak light made them blue when i knew they were white. i walked up the stairs to the top floor. a dark-haired boy walked with me. he had a face that fit his body. we didn't speak. when i got to the top of the stairs he walked away. i stood at the entrance of the master bedroom. she was in the bed. my stepfather's mother. she was lying on her back. the covers were pulled up to her neck. she was staring at the ceiling with her eyes open and her mouth almost but not quite closed. she was dead. she'd been dead for a while. her face changed. it became a skull covered with a thin layer of decomposing skin, grey and hairless and frozen in an expression of anguish. there was no seam between the two things. one moment she was herself, and the next she was something horrifying. i woke up with a gasp again. "jesus," i said. "three times." i was starting to believe the dream was my reality. maybe i really was sleeping or trying to sleep on that bathroom floor. maybe i always had been and always would be. trapped in some sort of bland purgatory. it took me a minute to work out that all the awakenings in my bed were real, and each false awakening on the floor signalled the beginning of another piece of a dream. i've had nights when more than one of my dreams has been a nightmare. this is the only time i've ever had three nightmares that have all connected to tell one unbroken story (if you can call it a story). i almost expected to wake up on the bathroom floor for a fourth time when i fell back asleep. my brain was kind enough to give me a break. my next dream was about a group of children playing war games. 211025 what's it to you? who go blather from