Griffin Leeds

(opposite) Jeron Braxton, Jizo and the Dead Children, Digital Greg Burak, Sydni with Blinds, Oil on panel

Over the river and through the woods

Griffin Leeds

Eleven months ago, they put Nonna on the machine to live on her behalf. Her children didn't know what to do. At any moment, she could have gotten better or worse. They stood outside her curtained box hospital room in a hall lined with other beeping exhibits. Mom and my two aunts and two uncles scratched their chins and rubbed their noses and took individual breaks from staring at the pink tile to look through the narrow window at the shallowing body inside. No one was making eye contact. No one wanted to be the one to say what this would mean financially.

A year ago, she was found at home unconscious by one of my aunts and taken to the hospital. It was afternoon on Halloween. I remember because when we came to her house the next day to pick up some of her things, some neighbor kids had destroyed her two pumpkins. The first one was a carcass on the sidewalk. The shell was flattened on the pavement but still had a soft shine like ceramic or glazed terracotta. They blew up the second one right there on the porch with a shitload of firecrackers and the porch looked like an orange murder scene. Inside we only touched what we had to bring and left everything else alone like a museum. We brought our own laundry basket to carry Nonna's things and left hers overflowing in her rat piss basement. We carefully stepped through the littered kitchen and around its Cheerio landmines. There was an empty space in the Cheerios like a chalk outline where my aunt found Nonna. Mom and I took a trip each to the car. Mom had me wait shotgun and went inside. She said she needed to use the bathroom.

It was chilly outside but also sunny. I was warm inside the car. The wood siding of Nonna's small house was already turning to flakes. My uncles and I had painted them a fresh coat the previous summer, but it didn't matter. The wood just couldn't hold paint anymore, one of my aunts critiqued as she watched us work. Then Nonna teetered out to the porch. We all waved. All of her was squinting. In the car I looked at how blue the sky became without clouds. Two crows were chasing a hawk, rolling and diving and scratching at it. Mom got back in the car. You'll have to come by to clean up the pumpkins tomorrow, she said. I followed her orders except for a bit of slime dried to the ceiling of the porch. I was too impressed to scrub it off. It had earned its place. Whenever I step onto that porch, I still glance at it the same way the old-fashioned Catholics genuflect before going into their pews.

Today they are going to take her off of her machine. In her hospital bed, you can barely see that Nonna is breathing. One time, I pull up her eyelids when no one is looking. She isn't wearing shoes. I think I see a little bit of crushed Cheerio ground into the callous of her heel. Nonna told me that she wanted to be barefoot when she was buried. Mom and my two aunts and my two uncles scratch their chins and rub their noses outside. I try to see how high I could speedily count between the beeps of her heart monitor. I hold her hand. They're dry from a year of hospital air. When I was four, Nonna and Mom took me to the beach at Lake Michigan. I had never been more proud of a sand castle. It was decorated with seaweed and a dead crawdad's head above the gate. Nonna pulled me up with those hands when I refused to abandon my sand fortress as the tide was coming in.

Tin can telephone

Griffin Leeds

If I pulled out one of my vocal cords, made it the Middle C on a grand piano, and played "Heart and Soul" three times a day, left the piano out in the sun until it was long enough (even though I don't know how long that is) and braided more into it, eyelashes, nose hairs, heart stings, nerves, lymphs, a quarter mile of my intestines, veins, ligaments, tendons.

If I stretched it all out until it was thin as fishing wire, if I found a pair of tin cans, pulled out a canine just so I could poke a hole in the bottom of each can (but also because I am so tired of biting).

If I linked the two cans with steady eyes but shaking hands, thread the self-wire through the cans and improvise a knot until I no longer can only pray it will hold, if the cans feel cool but the wire is still ninety-eight point six degrees and salty to smell because so much of me is there.

If I wore the strung cans around my neck like a boa and not a necklace and not a noose and the tin would tangle in my thoughts and feet and clamor around my knees and clatter on the ground as I walked around my room, my kitchen, my town.