The World's Smallest Horse

My skirt has a large jagged tear, mended with golden-green embroidery thread, which I blackened with a Sharpie permanent marker to match the fabric. After months of washings, the thread's luster and thickness, its inappropriateness, has returned. I am Frankenstein's monster, escaped, stitched and lumbering through Sunny Hills Assisted Living Home for the Elderly.

In this place, my grandmother has a room, a mirror, bed, table, a window. She believes a Robin Red Breast at this window to be the suicide-lost grandchild.

"You see this little bird, it comes to visit me all the time; it's Francie."

I tell her it's a bird with a real-bird body that was hatched from an egg, flies in the sky, eats worms.

How captive our dead. No words, no way to navigate around us, our guilt. Francie had only a half a brick of baker's chocolate and two cans of Canada Dry in her refrigerator. She threw cans filled with pennies when her Pekingese dogs barked; this was good, a dog-training tool, she explained. She named her dusty maroon Volvo. I don't remember it. When she died, we were unspeaking twigs looking on.

My grandmother gives two small upward nods and a distant flat smile, "Yes it is; I know it's Francie."

My grandmother's name is Elsie. She and my grandfather used to own a cabin on a lake before their daughters came. I have a photograph of them sitting together on the cabin's crude ladder-steps, cigarettes in hand, my grandmother's head drifting back in laughter; one arm snakes my grandfather's neck in a mock choke. His tongue is out, his eyes wide and rolled back in faked death, mocking her small power. In the shady background lies a broad cot right in the spring grass. I love that. This is lake life.

I imagine my grandmother treading the lake water, its cold waves, warm patches. I watch it from below, hypnotized in the rocky slime of the mud bottom. Her legs are gold pendulums swinging the murky green. Stay afloat, Elsie.

My grandmother once took me to a petting zoo. Set apart from the big canopy tent, from the snappy goats, zombie llamas, the dung heaps of hay, there was a traveling show horse named Mina. She lived in a red trailer decorated with a carnival art likeness, and fancy scrolled banners, words: "World's Smallest Horse!" "Only eats a handful of hay a day!" "Weighs only 70 pounds-FULL GROWN HORSE!"

She was a star, queen of Safeway parking lots. Lot to lot. Dust to dust. In her little trailer, Mina stood in reverence chewing, her eyes beacons to nothing, just that pure existence, life.

My grandmother stays in her bed, still as a sphinx, talking: vague babble, old riddles. I want to climb in, forget my improper stitches, burrow under covers with my grandmother, find whole meadows in this other world. We will forage for dandelions, and drink rainwater. We shall live like small horses.