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Grandmother

 

Her television spills its milky 

light onto chocolate covered graham crackers. 

They’re her granddaughter’s 

favorite, the crackers, but her granddaughter  

studies art history in Paris. Her daughter 

teaches English in Egypt. She’s set 

 

the graham crackers on the blue owl-glazed

china plate for her Thursday night date

with Rory and Lorelai—the Gilmore Girls.

 

Sixty years earlier, she looked out of a rowboat 

into the turquoise waters of Bear Lake in Idaho. Fish 

swirled around giant cages in the water. Her fish-

farmer Uncle caught a trout to show her, 

but dropped it outside the cage. A silver flash, 

then nothing. Uncle Rob said, 

 

“Trout’ll be back. Soon it’ll slam 

itself against the cage, trying

to get back to its family.” Now, 

 

she is again in her living room, the land of sagging 

couches, with the Gilmore Girls. The smell 

of sandalwood streams from wax that burns in snail

shell candles her daughter made and scattered 

across the coffee table. The flames 

 

sway across the fire 

opals—the ones studding her ears 

and the others in her eyes’ milk-flecked

 

pupils. She sees a ripple 

of static sway across the TV—

Rory and Lorelai’s faces sink 

into the middle of the screen. She rises, 

smacks the screen—nothing between her hand

and their faces but the glass of the TV.  

​

Reprinted from Typishly 

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