Nuggets

Emptied, precious, querulous, frail, a box of butter biscuits by the bedside, dun pills in a pale plastic tray, your grandmother lies in her tiny bones and mumbles, mysterious, while you say nothing, barely thirteen, blank as the day. You were to keep an eye on her breathing, her little bones heaving, and your eyes scan figurines, mementos on the windowsill — Little Bo Peep has lost her head — and green fields through the window: hay barns, small farms, a chicken battery shed. Bwwaaakk! Buck-back-bock-buckaaaakk! Rows upon rows of chickens. There was a funnel hung from a gibbet that swung like a big steel conical conundrum above their dun feathers — the color of your grandmother’s tights scrumpled on the floor. Even a year before, she would have swooned for shame at the sight of those tights half-trailed under her bed, their crinkled wee ankles jouking out, as if they had crawled under and tipped their wrinkled cargo into the void — your grandmother in bed, waiting for the spoon. Her weak breath does not reach heaven but hazes among the chipped figurines, the dull color television’s black screen, fading flesh-colored flowers on the wall- paper, dun as the wings of those dirt-crusted rows upon rows of throbbing chickens. When you dropped one into the funnel its head pushed through that blood-rimmed O to stare chicken-eyed at the other side, blackened numbles and giblets upon which it would soon stream like warm port, its feet still in a fidget. What gets passed on, through generations? Your grandmother tries to speak. Her bony fingers clutch your hand — and you bend your head down. But you’d get more sense from the sea in a seashell as your father enters the room beaming, Well! Well?