I sit on the mauve corduroy couch across from her bed surrounded in musty monotone blankets matted in white dog fur. The longer I sit here the more hair attaches to my black leggings, as if my legs are two giant hair magnets. My fingers trace the outline of a yellowed stain. I don’t want to know what its from. Outside the trees appear to be aflame. Reds and oranges provide a sense of life not found inside the sullen room we sit now. Here the air is dense. Heavy. The atmosphere is gray. 

I shuffle my bare feet against the navy blue shag carpet and with a loud breathy sigh, shut my math book sitting on my lap. The book makes a loud thud, finally breaking the thin silence that I had been sitting in for too long. I know I am not about to get any work done here. Not today. Instead I stare straight ahead. 

A small wooden cross hangs on the deep earth green wall. I always hated that color green. Ugly. The face of Jesus looks distorted, his hands and feet pierced with nails, blood runs down his legs, he appears in great pain. I wonder why she liked this cross so much. For me it was just grotesque. Still I dare not look at the bed below for that image is no prettier. 

The clock on the wall counts off the seconds. The minutes.

Tick

Tick 

Tick

Anxiety slowly reaches her cold stiff hands around my neck and squeezes until I am forced to take a gasp of breath. It smells like damp death and mothballs. Dread fills my lungs with a thick goopy cement. Fear drills herself into my bones . I go weak and begin to shake. It is finally setting in. This is the end. 

A hot tear pricks my left eye and runs down the side of my face. I wipe it off quickly into my left sleeve when I hear the soft footsteps of a woman climbing the stairs. As the familiar presence of my aunt enters I notice her eyes too are marked in dried tears. It feels as if I am looking at a forbidden image, the face of her crying. She is the strongest woman I know and here she is, so vulnerable, so naked. 

My aunt strokes my grandmothers face. But her eyes stay shut. Its been a week now since she has opened them, five days since she drank water. A month since she remembered her daughters name. Three since she remembered the love she had for me. 

I touch her skin and it feels as if it were made of wax. The bones underneath pultrude through the loose, dry, nearly translucent blueish skin. She is so small, so frail. I reach for her hand hidden under the covers and pull it out to hold. When I look down I yelp. Her fingers tips have turned black, the color of death, and the darkness climbs up her long boney fingers slowly, gently. 

The second my aunt sees them, she turns to me and I see the tears well up in her eyes. I know now she is not afraid to cry in front of me, and that release allows me to shed a tear myself. She pulls me in to a long embrace and I can feel her shoulders begin to shake up and down as she quietly sobs into my shoulder. As we pull back she looks me in my face and rests her heavy hand on my shoulder. 

“It won’t be much longer now” 

My mother comes in the room and takes me back to the couch. I rest my head in her lap. Her soft blue sweater brushes up against my cheek, and when I lift myself up, I notice the mascara stain I left. She calmly strokes my long black hair with a gentle hand. 

We have been waiting for this. We knew it was coming. Still, now her death seems to be approaching too quickly, like a freight train barreling towards us. We stand helpless to the wishes of God and time. 

Tick 

Tick 

Tick