The Great Whatever

Photo by Hamed omidian on Unsplash

Good morning! Today’s breath is a bit of a character study for a little girl who shows up in my drafts stories and poems kind of a lot. Usually, it’s other people talking about her. Today she finally gets to say something.

Gramma went into the Great Whatever and that's where she's going to stay. No one had to tell me that. I just knew. I knew she was getting ready to go there before anyone else because she stopped making metaphors. I told Mama, "Gramma's done making metaphors," and Mama waved her hands in that drunken bee kind of way and made little wet noises with her mouth and pushed me outside to go play.

Three days later, we went over to Gramma's house with a basket of the new tomatoes, and everything was quiet quiet. Mama told me to stay in the car and I did. I held one of those tomatoes in both my hands until I could feel the skin slipping around. I bit right into it, right there in the car with my seatbelt on, and I got juice all over my yellow top and shorts. Mama came out with her hands all stitched together and the color all gone from her face. She got in the car and just started up the engine -- she didn't even see me holding that bit-into tomato and the juice all down my front.

Gramma told me about the Great Whatever when I was too little to make the words in my own mouth. She told me she was going to go there -- not right now, but soon -- and I should just watch for it. I was watching for it, see, and that's why it didn't make my skin go all pale like Mama's. I just held that bit-into tomato and when we got home, I took off my yellow shirt and shorts and put them down in the bottom of the washing machine. The juice never did come out and they stayed forever at the back of my bottom drawer.