This piece was originally published in Quarto’s 2020 Spring Print Edition.
Illustration by Gisela Levy
When the Mama1 of the Worchesters died, she did not find herself in the Heaven she'd imagined. She had expected to feel the grace—warmth, the epicurean aura of the Lord she'd come to love2—and as her soul now descends the quiant suburban town of Amherst,3 she imagines she will find herself in the palm of the Lord. She doesn't know what that will be, not exactly, but she envisions something holy, like how Ma and Pa4 spoke about it back in the old day,5 when she was a little girl.6 Though as she flows higher and higher into the sky, she doesn't feel the golden sunshine7 of God. She floats wistfully,8 like an unattached feather in a wish-washing sky, a breeze entering9 through her chambers. She hears whispers and murmers,10 though the chorus of voice makes her sad11 to never touch Benny or August's, little Po, or Bennet's hands again.12 She realizes it's the chatter of cable wires.13 But in her moment of greatest sadness,14 the scene changes. She finds herself in a Garden of statues, women15 waning and waxed on marble pedestals.16 Inside, the Garden is situated in a Temple,17 with tall windows and stained glass. And as the sun shines, the room turns to the greens of the stained window.18 She finds herself sitting,19 in a stature she hasn't been able to compose since her youth. Her shoulders are straight20 and her hands are new.21 As she takes in her new environment, something outside the windows catches her eye: the lives of strangers, reunited in this heaven. In the meadow beyond the temple, she watches a father and son throw a red ball.22 And as they play, she realizes she has been watching them for hours.23 Sitting there, she begins drifting—changing.24 Her skin begins to morph, vines springing from the bench beneath her. The spread begins slowly.25 They embrace her arms, and creep up her torso.26 Her skin begins to fade, replaced by ancient marble.27 Slowly, her memories28 fade to a transparent gray.29 And at this moment she looks down at her hands,30 the light of the windows, the way it turns everything—the statues, the trees, the bench that she rests on—the way it turns everything to Gold.
1 A small and tough woman, her neighbors and friends knew her as a doting and loving grandmother of 5.
2 Love is something she had learned to re-understand in the warm and wooden space of her neighborhood's senior community sermons.
3 The playground where little Benny and August would play in the summertime, the little Church with its white sharp cross and crimson window frames, the purple middle school, and the coffee shops of the college, all fading in the distance.
4 Her own parents, may they rest in peace.
5 A time before cable television.
6 Pancakes were her favorite.
7 She doesn't feel the yellow warmth, on her frail shoulders, the soft kiss of God's whisper.
8 She doesn't feel protected the way she thought she would. She feels vulnerable, and exposed.
9 The way an air conditioner does on a spring night, like the breeze that flows through Benny's shirt as he sits on the blue wooden porch of their white house, thinking.
10 And she is trying to stay calm.
11 Makes her feel alone.
12 The small palms, little finger beds. To never tuck them in at night, to never brew them chamomile.
13 "Honey! Where did you put the cut turkey?" and "Sandy! I'm a minute away if you just let me leave the house." "Harold, you know we can't even afford the rent this month," reminiscent chatter.
14 As she traverses the open and gray, whispering and arid, big sky.
15 Young, and full, togas slipping at their shoulders.
16 Turned to stone.
17 The Temple is white and bronzed and black, with Roman pillars and carved Corinthian columns with such fine and meticulous craft that only The Gods could have constructed such fine marble.
18 Everything green, the leaves of grass, if you look close enough, formulate a billion shades of green at one. Light and ludic, some dark emerald.
19 The bench is pleasantly comfortable, despite being hard.
20 The hunch from old age disappeared.
21 Untouched.
22 The ball bouncing, creating black shadows, the ball dropping, the boy running after it. The way the red ball seems to fall in slow motion.
23 Time has become somewhat of an illusion.
24 She is given to her surrounding.
25 Like this: comfortable, not suffocating. Like the way her mother would dress her as she'd get ready for church Sundays.
26 She does not resist.
27 Her wrinkles, no longer apparent.
28 A flash like a kaleidoscope; bursting shades of green then red and blue.
29 She will no longer remember the taste of mangoes, her favorite food, or the way sand feels between her toes. She will forget the way someone else's hands feel, or the way it feel to read your favorite novel in your favorite outdoor spot, hers, under the cedar. She will forget how her kitchen; the lifetime she has spent in it. She will forget herself. What eyes are, what hair. She will no longer know what alive feels like. She will no longer be alive. She will no longer have the capacity to know, to think, to be.
30 On earth, her grandson Bennet has walked over to the graveyard. It is funny how he'd passed this graveyard a million times. How now, when he passes, he can't help but start to feel his throat burn. Tears flow, uncontrollably, a sensation he doesn't want to feel release from but does. He sits there, amongst the stone graves, knees apart, staring. Waiting. He doesn't know for what. He is trying to recall the voice of his grandmother. Will he ever forget it? He sits, watching the way the sun hits the stones.
Hanna is a rising sophomore at Barnard College, intending to pursue English with a Creative Writing concentration. She likes a big open road.