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Living on Borrowed Time
Goodbye, yesterday. Hello, uncertain tomorrow.
Grandma’s watching the news again.
She can sit there for hours, her toothless gums gnawing on the artificial honey candies she has me barter for every week as her “treat.” She closes her eyes and says she tries to imagine it’s the chocolate she hasn’t had since she was a girl. Her wrinkled hands stay curled in her lap; sometimes, if I peek just right, I can glimpse the bar code tattoo she received on her right wrist when she was eighteen years old.
It was a different world then — or so she’s told me in snatches of conversation when she’s more lucid. The brain fog comes over her a lot. When she was a young mother, she lived through a chemical attack in a big city she resided in. Those were in the early days of the war across the continent. If she hadn’t just given birth to my mother, she would have been given a rifle and a pair of fatigues, shipped out just the same as my grandfather had been.
On the news tonight is a young woman dressed in heavy clothes as she stands against a snowy backdrop. The city behind her looks serene — like something out of one of those old Christmas movies we used to be able to watch — but the crackle of missiles cuts through any other noise. I don’t know if the woman on the screen is shivering because she’s cold or afraid…
