by Amanda Callais
Grandmama awakens me as I dream about the past. About the days I sat on her lap asking for stories. The days she sat in that orange-brown armchair next to the fireplace. The one straight from the seventies. It didn’t recline, but it rocked. And she swayed, weaving tales in her pink jumpsuit and silver and gold wedges. House shoes, she called them. She taught me to build houses with hard stone and cool brick. Never straw. Not even wood. Nothing that could be blown down. We should not steal, she said, but we can search. We can look around and around for the things that were made for us. For the things that were neither too hot nor too cold. For the things that fit just right. Then, one hand pressed to my forehead, a prayer on her lips, she lays me down, soul to keep while I sleep on her guestroom’s soft sheets.
When she awakens me again, I dream about the present and it burns. I am standing in her kitchen while sleeping on the scratchy sheets of the in-patient care center I’ve been confined to for the next 48 hours. Voluntary suicide watch, they call it. But I have not admitted myself. I am 14. It is required by the State. I shiver on the sheets, but I sweat in her kitchen. She stands at the sink, washing dishes in her pink jumpsuit and house shoes. Aunts, uncles, cousins, Mom, and Dad. They buzz around, happy. Happy she is here. Happy she lived. Happy we lived. Her ghost gives me a wry grin. But I have never seen her smile that way. She doesn’t smile that way. It cannot be her. Get out! Get out! Go! Leave my grandmama’s body, I scream. Let it stay. Let it stay where we buried it. In the mausoleum, where I have never been in the two years since she died. Where I will not go, even after I survive this current hell, not until my grandfather passes away 24 years later. Leave her body, I cry, into the void of this dream. Into the void that is me. Into the void that is her ghost, pulling me through the present until I give chase. Running after her out the kitchen door. Down the concrete driveway to the culvert made of stone that touches the black asphalt road. Running. Chest heaving. Screaming. My family stares. This isn’t her! This isn’t me! Please. Believe me. You must believe me. We burst into flames.
I drift back to sleep. The kind of sleep that comes once your energy has burned away, once your stomach has been pumped, once the 45 pills you swallowed have left your system and there is space for the future to seep in. Grandmama’s ghost rocks me awake. “Come, child,” hand in mine, she leads me out of the white room and empty dream to a place in the pines. She sits on a bed of brown pine straw. I find my place in her lap. She cradles me in her arms. Rocking back-and-forth, back-and-forth, like she did before we learned she had cancer. Before I swallowed the pills. Before death marked us both, and only I escaped. She holds my head in her hands, pulling my ear close, whispering, weaving, winding a tale of a future built of structures made of cool stone. A future at the end of a path only a ghost can know. She will show it to me, she says, this path through the pines, but I must promise to walk it and walk it well. It will help me banish the ghosts, she says. They, like the scars from the razors I’ve sliced through my hands, will fade. Words like suicide will no longer haunt me. One day, she tells me, I will see myself as she does. Her granddaughter made of dream cloth. Golden locks. Strong will. Good mind. You will build it well, she says. You are cool stone, she whispers. It will be different, she promises. It will be beautiful. She kisses my forehead. You are worthy. She cups my face. You have something to live for, so much to live for. She hugs me close. Then, she takes me by my hands. It will be good. I take a step. Do you see it? I tell her I do. Then go. I tell her it is made for me. I tell her it fits. It fits just right.
Amanda Callais is a writer and attorney. When not working, she lives and writes between worlds, navigating a transatlantic relationship with her partner who lives in Southern Spain while writing about it, her Louisiana roots, purple Jeep, and everything in between. Her work has been published in The Sun Magazine, HerStry, Five Minutes, and The Good Life Review.
Emerge Literary Journal 