Elegy for a Black and White Aunt
I step out of the limousine into a blast of Arctic sun. The other mourners are leaving their cars, waddling across the ice like penguins. Aunt Betsy, I remember the lithographs you made. Many years later, when I discovered my fiancé was cheating on me and she told me that life isn’t simple, that nothing is black and white, I remembered your lithographs. I remembered the ink on your albino skin.
Aunt Betsy, do you remember? My son, was colicky day and night. You said: Let me cover him in black ink and roll him over a canvas. My wife’s face was horrified. You said: Just kidding, but you really meant it.
You collected the New York Times, stacked them up until there was only a single trail through your apartment. Your hands were too gnarled with arthritis to do lithographs anymore, but your world was still black and white, increasingly black and white, and a fire hazard.
When you lost your mind, you thought all those stacks were a conspiracy to smother you with paper, and you triple locked your door and wouldn’t let your daughters, those three twisted sisters, those saboteurs, into your apartment. When they got the locksmith and the landlord and the police, it was too late. You were dead.
Your oldest daughter said, What a mess. What a disaster. The second daughter asked, Are there companies that specialize in cleaning the apartments of dead hoarders? The youngest daughter said, Just give me a match. The cop and landlord looked at each other, and the youngest daughter said, Ha ha ha Just kidding, but she wasn’t.
I came in as they were all about to clear out and leave the problem for another day. At my request, they left me alone in the apartment. I settled down into her world, which had always been black and white, everything black and white.
Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over eight hundred of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines worldwide. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize four times. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition.
Photo credit: Correne Martin is the associate editor of the Courier Press in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. She has worked for small-town newspapers since obtaining her bachelor’s degree in English/journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville in 2004. Correne has been married for four years, has a 2.5-year-old son and a baby girl due in July.