we spent the grandchildren’s inheritance and i regret nothing
how she loved words. the house was garlanded with them, the likes of which i never heard outside: facetious, gallivant, amoral, disingenuous, sarcasm. she would explain carefully where the word had come from, how it had arrived at its meaning and all that had happened to it in the meantime — a traveller from away, like she was herself.
and so precise with how she used them. you do not hate liver - you are disgusted by it, you abhor it, it is repugnant. well tough shit, eat it anyway there’s nothing else.
i would hold the words in my mouth, turning them on my tongue, pocketing them between my cheek and jaw, like the liver i saved to spit out when no one was looking. you are incorrigible, recalcitrant.
it hurts, it grieves that the words are going, gone — what a fortune we squandered and never knew it. we have so few left to trade between us now in the circular economy of our diminishing conversation.
the precision long lost over months, i have to work to interpret her intent when, in the dining room, tartan bib snapped around her neck and falling over her torso to her lap she says, this is my godmother, my grandmother, pointing at the other woman who shared her table who only speaks dialect and one english word: okay.
i know what it means when, to a jazz tempo flurry of okay, okay, okay, okay, my mother points at me and says to the woman, this, this is mine.