Heaven Skyy

Granny Glenda didn’t like it when my mom dumped me at her house just because she wanted to go ‘cavorting’ with her friends. I didn’t know what ‘cavorting’ meant so, suspecting something evil and malignant, I looked it up in the dictionary and it meant ‘to play’. I used it in a comic I wrote for class and the teacher underlined it and drew a red star beside it and wrote “Great word!” I didn’t feel proud cause it was Glenda’s word, it’s not like I invented it or something.
I heard the front door close and Granny Glenda appeared in the kitchen, her cheeks rosy, she looked angry. She stirred the pot, then whacked the spoon heavily against the edge twice and laid it on the counter. She wiped her hands on the dishcloth angrily then threw it over her shoulder and gave me a cold stare. She was a chubby, short lady with soft white skin, chin length straight brown hair, a slight over-bite typical of her Scottish background and thick glasses that fogged up when she went near the cooking pot. Her arms and hands were perfectly white and puffy like dough.
“And how are you?” she said like ‘are you proud of yourself now?’
“Fine,” I said. I felt real bad, I knew she was going to be angry with me. I concentrated on my drawing and tried not to look at her cause that’d probably make her madder.
“Fine?” she repeated, as though that was the craziest thing to be. She went into the fridge and pulled out a bunch of lettuce and whacked it onto a cutting board positioned by the sink. She picked up a big blade and began cutting it, creating this very satisfying crunching sound. The pieces of lettuce rained into a colander in the sink. I wished I could go over and watch her do it like I used to. I used to by hypnotized by chopping lettuce, the way it would go from white to dark green with every chop of the knife, the spray of water, the speed in which the colander would fill up. She’d let me take out a piece and pop it into my mouth. I loved the crunchiness, but then she’d always make me feel bad about it by saying something like ‘lettuce has no nutritional value.’
“And how’s school?” Another question landed in front of me like a grenade being thrown over a fence.
“School’s good”.
“School’s good,” she mimicked me, I’d said something wrong again. She shook her head like she couldn’t believe it.
“Hasn’t anyone ever taught you to have a conversation? Fine. Good. You kids have no education and I’m sure your mother doesn’t teach you any decent manners. If someone asks you ‘how are you’ and ‘how’s school’ it’s customary to return the question. This is called con-ver-sa-tion,” she said, sounding out the last word like I was 4. I felt my eyes get heavy and I started feeling really tired. She was really mad, she didn’t want me here. When I was little she didn’t mind at all. She’d give me bubble baths, let me give William, her little shitzu, treats, we’d go to the mall and the park. I was cuter then, ‘a good kid’ I’ve been told. Now I was just burden and a stark reminder of my mother as I grew to look like her. Granny was fond of saying ‘You didn’t even take a single gene from your daddy’.

I just wanted to be at my desk at school like everyone else in my class. I wanted to stop thinking about the cold stares Granny Glenda was giving me thinking I didn’t notice. I thought about Marianne Ravenwood and what she would do but there were no scenes in Raiders where she felt bad, Marianne never felt bad, she would just grab up her bag and walk away from here is what she would do. She’d say ‘To hell with this’ and sling her bag over her shoulder and walk right out the door, ignoring the calls of her evil grandmother from the doorway. I looked at my bag and considered it, but where would I go?

“Have you spoken to your father?” Glenda asked suddenly. Her voice had softened somewhat, it didn’t come down on my ears like a hatchet. My simple answer was to say ‘not really’ but I decided to make a longer sentence out of it so she wouldn’t get mad.

“He called around the beginning of the school year and we spoke for a bit. Him and mom fight a lot,” I added as though Granny didn’t know. She ignored this last bit.
“Now, I’m making vegetable soup and salad and you’re going to eat up everything I put on the plate missy, even if you are only here a few days I’m going to try and get as many vitamins into you as I can.”
Glenda assumed that my mother and I ate out of cans. She once said to Simon, her boyfriend, ‘They eat out of cans and steal sugar, salt and pepper from restaurants.’ This wasn’t true. My mom could make vegetables in the oven, none of which I ate though. There was always Chinese noodles in packages around and fruits like bananas and there was a Lebanese place around the corner where we would get lentil soup and falafels like every other day. Falafels were made of beans, which were good for you. For the first time since I got there she looked at me directly through half fogged glasses. She really stared. She used to be a nurse and I could tell she was assessing me.

“Ts. Look at you. Circles under your eyes, pale skin,” she walked over to me, pulled my face up to look at her and she looked down her nose at me.
“No iron.” She pulled down the skin under my eyes to look at my eyeball. She huffed again then placed both soggy, warm hands on my cheeks and looked at me suddenly like she was going to cry. She then pulled my head under her nose and sniffed deeply.

“Ug! Smoke. I don’t know how she can smoke around you like that,” she said disgusted and I guess too much time had gone by where I didn’t immediately remind her of her hatred of my mother so she turned around and stirred her soup again.

She led me up to the bathroom to take a bath which I didn’t half mind because she had a big bathtub with a properly working shower head that detached from the handle. You could adjust the spray to different settings like ‘massage’ which made the water come out like machine gun bullets, ‘mist’ which was kinda cool and of course ‘spray’ which was the normal one. She had two shower curtains, one cream coloured one that went inside the tub and a lacy brown one that hung outside the tub. It was like being inside a delicious pastry. Shower curtains were awesome to me because we didn’t’ have any in our bathroom, you just had to point the shower head at the wall and only half your body got wet and the other half was freezing cold. Also our shower head was rusted and the water pressure was like “an old man peeing’ as my mother said. Glenda gave me bath bubbles which I was too old for but then I remembered the scene in Raiders where Marianne Ravenwood had a bubble bath so I allowed myself this one luxury. When I finished bathing and put my clothes back on I realized how heavily they smelled of smoke and I almost didn’t want to wear them. Even my fresh clothes in my backpack smelled like smoke from the car. I dressed anyways and found a bottle of Simon’s ‘Old Spice’ in the cabinet and gave myself a few sprays of that. It smelled nice and warm like pies and foggy memories.

When I got back down to the kitchen the table was already set. My spot was obvious, I had the Little Mermaid placemat, still dusted off and brought out for my presence. She instructed me to sit by pointing to my spot and saying ‘sit’ in much the same voice she used for William. A steaming hot bowl of soup with horrifying looking vegetables floating in it was placed in front of me. Green of varying shades, reds and even a yellow, what vegetable was yellow? What gruesome gourd could this be? The smell was too complicated for me, my throat closed in protest immediately.

“Don’t stare, eat,” Granny ordered. She placed her bowl across from me and got busy eating right away even though the soup was still nearly boiling. She broke up thick chunks of bread and dropped them into the bowl, sinking them with her spoon and holding them down until they didn’t float back up. Her arms worked busily tearing bread, drowning them, fishing them out and eating them. When she ate she had the same look of concentration on her face that I she had when she was knitting, like she was getting an important task done. Suddenly she stopped eating and looked toward the front door.

“Simon?” she called out. And for the first time all day I saw William dart out of the living room and wag his tail madly in the hallway expecting his beloved master. Of course, I didn’t hear anything and I don’t know what William and Glenda knew that I didn’t.
“I swear I thought I heard him or something. Strange,” she said, before returning to her soup. I wondered about the cologne I was wearing. William waited a while longer then returned to the family room convinced it was a false alarm. I started to eat my soup, starting with small sips of the broth, which was tolerable, but avoiding the chunks of vegetables.

“Drop the bread in,” said Granny, tearing up thick chunks and dropping them into my soup before I could object. This was catastrophic, the bread would soak up the only part of the soup I was capable of eating, leaving the completely revolting vegetables exposed, uneaten. The bread chunks sank to the bottom and the watermark on the side of the bowl started lowering slowly as though there was a drain at the bottom of my bowl. I knew I had no choice but to eat them. Things seemed smoothed over with Grandma so I wasn’t about to do something I knew would make her mad by avoiding her vitamin infused soup.
I picked up the first gelatinous blob of bread and slipped it into my mouth, the texture like a fuzzy slug. I imagined these fuzzy slugs were for my own good, they were medicine for a horrible illness that I was dying from. It was for my own good, I told myself, otherwise it’s a terrible death for me, first I’d lose control of my bowels, then I’d throw up my stomach and finally, bleed from my eyeballs. I ate all the bread in this fashion then stared at the naked, left over vegetables in the bowl.

“Full already?” asked Granny, who’d finished her bowl and two slices of bread. I nodded. “I shouldn’t have put the bread in,” she said swiping away my bowl.

Simon was Granny Glenda’s ‘boyfriend’ and he worked in a hardware store. He was nice, I liked Simon, sometimes he’d give me these hard candies that had probably been in his pocket since WW1, but still, he was nice. Mom used to tell me not to sit on his lap or let him touch me, which didn’t matter cause Simon never asked me to sit on his lap and never touched me – except to smack the back of my hands really hard when we played that game where your hands hover over your opponents and they have to smack the tops of your hands before you pull away. He was really good and usually he’d let me get him but by the end of a game my hands would be numb and red.

I asked Glenda if I could give William (full title Prince William) a treat and she said sure but that I should make sure that he say’s ‘please’ by giving me a paw. I took the bone-shaped treat from the box and Prince William came running into the kitchen. He didn’t even make eye contact with me, it was the cookie he stared at, as though he and the cookie shared some telepathic connection. I moved the cookie back and forth and told him he was ‘getting sleepy,’ he followed the cookie with his eyes and didn’t even breathe.

After all that I sat at the table a while with my drawing book and scenes of devastation. Glenda sat in front of the television watching some show about interior design while knitting something baby blue. That’s when I started feeling weird and out of place. It happened frequently lately, whenever I was some place that wasn’t home or school. My head felt light and dizzy and I started feeling like I wanted to cry my eyes out. I started taking deep breaths, I knew it would go away as long as no one interfered.

Once my mom left me with these people I didn’t know, some friends of hers. They had all these friends over and I just sat in a chair. They didn’t put the TV on for me or anything and I guess they thought I was listening to their conversation but they were speaking Ukrainian. Then the girl, Sashenka, put a mattress on the floor of the living room and told me I’d sleep there, right there, in front of everyone, she said ‘in the Ukraine kids would sleep in restaurants by pushing chairs together.’ I refused to sleep and in fact even refused to get into the bed and this caused a fight between two of the girls. They left me in the chair and later I started to cry and everyone went home. I felt so miserable and lonely.

Glenda was fixed on her needles, which clacked together angrily like she hated knitting. Everything started swirling in my eyes so I focused on one of her many paintings of a Scottish Terriers. I picked a black terrier that wore a plaid bandana around his neck. Why would someone paint that? Another wave of sadness and I started thinking about my room and my book at home, on my desk. I could see it so clearly there I thought I could will it into existence here if I just tried. I felt like I’d give anything in the world to have my book and my eyes welled up with tears. I wanted to go home so badly. Maybe the illness I imagined earlier was real and these were the first symptoms. Maybe mom and Granny knew that I have this illness and that’s why I’m here. That’s probably why they always have a private conversation upon dropping me off; they’re talking about my failing health. That’s why Granny is so obsessed with vitamins, I need vitamins. I started feeling a tingling up my spine and numbness in my limbs, it was spreading fast whatever it was. I needed to go to the bathroom. I stood up and felt lightheaded, Granny asked me where I was going like it was nuts that I’d actually stand up.

In the mirror I saw that I was pale, extremely pale, there was a purple vein in my forehead that throbbed. I stuck my tongue out and it looked like a strip of bloody flesh against the colour of my face. Surely I was sick, I was sick and they weren’t telling me because if I knew I’d only make myself worse with worry. Death. Death was inevitable. My hands started shaking and my stomach turned in knots. My skin became as sensitive as an eyeball, my clothes felt as stiff as paper. I cried in the bathroom. I’m dying and they don’t even care. I cried for a while, considered what it would be like to no longer exist then I decided that if they didn’t care what the hell did I care? I returned to my spot at the table where I was drawing. My entire body felt like it was disintegrating, I could barely think of anything and my drawings took on a new completely demented theme.

“Go outside!” declared Glenda suddenly, so suddenly I jumped. “Take Princey for a walk.”

Sure, I thought, get rid of the rancid scent of death then. As though being ordered by an evil fairy godmother I got out of my seat and grabbed up Princey’s leash. He appeared at my feet almost instantly, like he’d beamed there somehow, his tail wagging impossibly fast, his pink tongue dangling past his little white teeth. He was cute and that made me happy.