Dolly, My Dolly

Artwork: © SC Martinez

Published in The Blue Mountain Review, September 2023

My father’s mother was crazy, but I loved her. She lived near the steel mills, and everything was covered with a flimsy grey blanket of silt that rose and fell when the wind stirred. She subsisted entirely on grapefruit. I think she was crazy. She tried to burn herself because she loved my father too much, my mother said. He was her only child, her only love. She called herself Dolly, dyed her hair red, and curled it. There was a mole near the corner of her mouth that danced when she spoke. Mystery paperbacks filled her house and birdseed from her parakeets. She would hold a seed in her lips and her bird would gently retrieve it. My mother said she pushed her blind mother down the steps. Dolly wore cloth flowers soaked in perfume that left a trail wherever she moved in her daylong battle against the dust. My mother told me half stories about her that led me to finish in my mind as terrible as I could imagine. She had no right to try to make me hate her too, to let me doubt her love. Dolly, let me sleep in the little room in the big brass bed by the window where the breeze spars with the curtains and the clock in the hall counts the seconds. She had a heavy iron elephant painted yellow that, by turning its tail, a single cigarette would drop from its belly. She broke her hip falling down the steps rushing to escape the fire. They took her to a nursing home, and we didn’t go to Indiana to visit her any more. When she died seven years later my mother didn’t tell me. I was away at school, and she didn’t tell me. I always wanted red hair.