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My Circus Grandmother

Grandma’s air had been sucked out of her days. A few decades retired, the tattoos on her body drooped as if they were looking for water. Her bright purple flowers faded into a mauve cloud. Her dragons looked more like stuffed pets. Her snake swallowed her waist.

Once she told me she missed the drunken card game afternoons. Missed the rude duck sounds of the clowns. She was angry as a bulldog until her afternoon wine.

I was twelve and still felt like a picture on the wall, as if waiting for my life to become a life. The heat of summer days buzzing over my skin. I’d make myself a dry turkey sandwich, flipping through childhood.

“I know what I want,” I told her, “I want to be an illustrated lady like you,” I said.

She shook her head as if I just got the right answer to the million-dollar question.

“Monkeyface,” she told me the year she contracted cancer, “I was broken all my life, but it never made me any less interesting.” There was a lump in her gut, and it wouldn’t stop growing.

I held her hand, curled up like a hawk’s talon. I told her jokes that I heard on TV.

She laughed. “You’re no stand up comic, but Grandma loves you darling, hallelujah.”

She had a tattoo of a clown on each of her biceps. I loved those clowns, those arms. In the end, the clowns seemed to fall asleep where her muscles used to be. When I cradled her head, her last laugh broke on my cheek.

Meg Pokrass is the author of nine fiction collections, and her work has appeared in hundreds of publications, including three Norton anthologies of the flash fiction form. She is the founding editor of Best Microfiction. Meg lives in Inverness, Scotland. 

Jeff Friedman has published eight collections of poetry and prose, including The Marksman and Floating Tales. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and numerous other awards and prizes. Meg Pokrass and Friedman’s co-written collection of fabulist microfictions, The House of Grana Padano, is available from Pelekinesis.

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