In the clearing, three children glistened. They danced in a strange way, coming so close together that they seemed to meld into one before bursting apart and scattering like dandelion seeds across the park. Joan was meant to be picking violets with her grandmother, so they could make pretty purple jars of jelly to serve at her birthday party, but she couldn’t keep her eyes off the dancers.
She stayed close to the ground as she picked, so she would go unnoticed. Behind her, her grandmother picked loudly. Even though the flowers’ stalks were tiny, her grandmother yanked so forcefully that Joan could hear each one getting snapped. Without looking, she knew her grandmother’s hands were already stained green, and for the first time in her life Joan felt embarrassed of her grandmother and her hunched back, and her bony, always discolored fingernail.
Joan slowly moved away from her grandmother closer to the dancers. There was something wrong with them. Every once in a while, the light caught on something iridescent in the air around them, so that they looked like they were dragonflies, enveloped in translucent wings. Joan wished they would stand still, so she could make out exactly what was hovering around them. She was sure her grandmother couldn’t see the oddness because her grandmother couldn’t even see a needle well enough to thread it. Still, her grandmother yelled warnings at Joan to stay away from the dancers.
When the basket was only half full of flowers, Joan couldn’t bare it any longer and ran to greet the dancers. She knew that her grandmother wouldn’t be fast enough to stop her.
The dancers stilled as Joan approached them. She knew right away that they were fairies. She couldn’t see their wings because the clouds had slid over the sun, but she could feel them moving the air. And the dancers had the smallest, most useless looking feet Joan has ever seen. It would take them ages to get anywhere on feet so small! The middle-sized fairy, a girl with stood on her toes out of her shoes, extended her arm toward Joan. At the end of it was a flower.
There were rules for fairies in the stories Joan’s grandmother read her. Never eat their food. Don’t take, always trade. Don’t lie. But Joan couldn’t remember any of them. The flower looked like a violet, but was much too large. It would be beautiful beheaded and suspended in a jar at Joan’s party.
As Joan reached out to take it, the girl asked her, “Don’t you want to be near your grandmother?”
“No,” Joan answered, not even taking a moment to consider the question.
The girl let Joan take the flower. Their fingers brushed for a moment, and Joan winced at the cold. She took pride in this, only reacting with her eyes and not her body, but in the split second her eyes were closed, the fairies had disappeared.
Joan tried to walk back to her grandmother to show her the flower, but it seemed her grandmother was already on her way home, walking at a quickness Joan hadn’t seen from her in years. She tried to catch up, but was struck by an achiness in her ankles that forced her to be slow. By the time Joan got back to her family’s condominium, her grandmother was already at the sink, washing the flowers. Joan went to her, but her grandmother walked in the opposite direction, toward her room.
For a week it was like this, Joan would try to join a family meal or go to her grandmother with a book to read and her grandma would shoot up, walking backwards to her room.
“I think you need to apologize,” her father said on the eve of her birthday. He had a cough, so he spent her party in the library, waving at the guests through the window he had cut in the door. Joan’s mother was there, but she was heavily pregnant, and spent most of the time sitting. Joan longed for her grandmother, and her sweet stale smell, like the inside of the icebox. The jelly was on the table, including a jar holding the large violet, which meant that while avoiding her, Joan’s grandmother had finished the canning.
Before cake was served, Joan was determined to make amends with her grandmother. She tried to walk to her grandmother’s room, but her muscles seized up, preventing her from getting any closer. Eating her cake, tears stinging her eyes, it occurred to her: She had forgotten to trade the fairies for the violet, and they had taken her grandmother as payment.
A few months later, her mother died in childbirth, taking the baby with her. At the funeral, her grandmother stood in the back, one of many angels of death figurines in the cemetery. When her father died three years later of tuberculous, Joan had the awareness to stay back long enough for her grandmother to come to see her son before he was lowered in the ground.
Even though they couldn’t be near each other, they developed a way to still care for one another. Joan would peel the potatoes because it hurt her grandmother’s wrist so, and her grandmother would cut the onions, because Joan couldn’t do so without crying. Joan would serve them bowls of strew, eat hers, and then disappear to her room. And her grandmother would wash the dishes. They would leave notes for each other, which Joan cherished even though her grandmother’s shakes made her cursive eligible. On quiet nights, when the traffic paused and there wasn’t any wind, Joan could at least hear grandmother humming, knowing that her grandmother’s hearing was too bad to hear Joan, and Joan would be seized with sadness for her grandmother and how she was even more alone than her.
They went to the park frequently. There was enough space there to allow them to be separated, but still facing each other. Joan waved largely and exaggerated her movements, so her grandmother could see her despite her poor eyesight. It was the closest they got to being together until the winter before Joan turned seventeen.
It was so cold nothing would cook fully. The water wouldn’t boil, and all the vegetables remained hard. Frost crept down the windows onto the floor. The weakness Joan felt when she tried to go to her grandmother spread across her body. She was too frail to open the wood stove, and too frail to get up off the floor, which prevented her grandmother from getting close enough to tend the fire. The whole apartment glistened as ice grew from it. Joan slept on the floor, shaking. She woke up in a sun spot, feeling again like a child in the warm, park grass. She felt her whole body loosen, and the air around her thin. She found herself walking toward her grandmother, and she saw her grandmother walking toward her. Sun streamed in from everywhere and filled them up.
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