--NO IS A COMPLETE SENTENCE

                                            Banana Raisin Cookies

Out of the blue, my grandfather wants a banana raisin cookie.  He lets me know by screaming, “I want a banana raisin cookie, goddamn it!”

He’s forgotten his teeth, left them somewhere.  Now he’s gummy, but he sounds like Elmo, his voice gravelly and strangely comical, but also a bit frightening.  He looks like Elmo as well, with his beet-red face and clam shell head wobbling without a neck.

He’s wearing a plaid hunter’s shirt over his desiccated frame.  I’ve only known him brittle, with hatpin bones.  I am eight now, or at least I am eight now looking back on being eight years old.

His wheelchair bounces when he wants something.  The roller wheels squeal in need of oil, but Dad’s not here to squirt WD-40 on them.  I wonder where Dad is, where Mom is, why they made me the sentry.  I am eight.

Then he needs a bath because his diaper is full.  “Change me!  It’s horrible.  I can feel shit leaking down my legs.”

His eyes are soupy brown sprockets, a pair of bees drowned in urine.  In his anger and frustration, he is shrinking, dissipating, taking baby steps backward toward some kind of awful youth he must have had.  He is bones and sags and leaking water.  He is my grandfather and I should love him more than I do.

I check to find his diaper dry, though it smells foul, like a tree with a family of rotting owls stuffed inside its hollow trunk.

“Change me!  Change me!  This is hideous!”

I inspect again but there is no shit.

“Poppy,” I say, “you’re clean for now.”

But he goes on being an angry talking parrot.  Change me!  Change me!

As a distraction, I turn my ears off and keep on examining him, making comparisons.  He has a puppet mouth, a side to side working jaw.  His nostrils are filled with hairy spiders trying to crawl out.  His face skin is a trampoline warped by too much sun and rain.   

Change me!  Change me!  This is horrible!

I have learned how to turn off my ears when necessary and I’ve learned how to make my brain a house with different rooms.  In the attic is where I store the things I never want to see again, but now the attic door opens and I remember the night of my fifth birthday.  Grandfather bought me a locket, gave it to me without anyone else knowing.  Came to my bedroom in utter darkness.  He wasn’t dementia-ed then, or maybe he was.  His breath sounded bear-husky and he smelled like the banana raisin cookies Mom had made.  His hands were rough and hot but after he clasped the locket around my neck, his fingers roamed and turned into ice bones on the rest of my skin, the first time something that cold had touched me there.  

Change me!  Change me!

Now he’s right.  I can smell it, the sharp, awful shit tang of shit.  I don’t want to change him.  I don’t know how.  I’m scared, but he’s bouncing in his chair while the wheels make terrified bird cheeping noises, and I’m imagining the seeping shit running a brown river down his thighs and calves and splatting on the floor tile and it makes me so sick I have to fight off gagging.

I can’t turn my ears off anymore.  I want to slap him even though I’ve never slapped anyone before, let alone an adult.  But he deserves a slap.  More than that.

My arms and legs twitch.  My skin has a forest fire on it, licking hot and fast and furious.  The attic door in my head is open, Grandfather is screaming and he smells like a full toilet that hasn’t ever been flushed.

I make my twitching fingers grab the wheelchair handlebars, intending to do good but ideas pop.  I could lead him out the door and push him down the porch steps and say it was an accident, Grandfather wheeled away by himself.  Better yet, I could shove him down the basement steps which has a lot more stairs.  I could watch him tumble and flail and then afterward, we might be partially even.

But I don’t.  Instead, I push the chair toward the bathroom.  I swing the door open and squeeze his chair in while not looking in the mirror.  I take a breath through my mouth to avoid the smell and say, “Please be quiet, and I will try to do this for you.”

Now Mom is the age Grandfather was when I was six.  We’re sitting on the sofa, just back from the cemetery where we visited graves and headstones, Dad’s and Grandfather’s.  It’s the first time I’ve been in decades.  Going has made me feel like I’m eight again, or like the eight-year-old me is trying to force herself inside the adult me.

Mom says, “I brought a surprise,” and fishes something out of a bag.  “I haven’t made them in so long,” she says.

She takes the cellophane off the plate of banana raisin cookies surgically, as if what’s under the thin clear plastic is made of fragile porcelain.

“These were your grandfather’s favorites.”

When she holds the plate out for me, the familiar sugary-banana smell gets sucked up into my nostrils, heading toward my brain and the door to the attic.  My fingers tremble jaggedly, like tarantula legs.  A sudden wave of nausea kicks in.  I swallow a bitter squirt of hot bile.

“Hey, honey, what’s wrong?”

I want to tell her that I am eight again, that I have lived twenty-five years without being kissed by a man who was not a family member.  There is so much I want to tell her, so I take a bite of cookie and swallow it down hard, choking a little even though the cookie is moist.  I finish the entire cookie and then another and after that it gets easier eating them.  Maybe it’s twenty minutes or less, but when I look down at my lap the plate is empty but for scattered crumbs.

Mother’s eyes slit flat as she grins wide, on the cusp of a laugh.  “Wow.  You’ve either been starving yourself, or you really missed my banana raisin cookies.”

I say, “It’s neither one of those things.”  I say, “It’s this,” and pull the locket out from my purse.  I say, “This is what I need to talk to you about.”