“The best stories and the best characters are the ones most full of life…I consider myself to have not just one home, but a collection of home-places and home-people.”
Audie Waller is a sophomore at Duke University studying English and Creative Writing. She was a 2024 YoungArts Winner with Distinction in Writing and the recipient of the Lin Arison Excellence in Writing Award, and her work has been featured in Cargoes literary magazine and Crashtest literary magazine, among other publications. Audie lives in Greenville, South Carolina with four dogs and three cats, and she is excited to pursue a career in writing and academia.
What about this piece means ‘homing’ to you?
I am interested in the question of what remains of a person once they are gone. What do we take with us to the grave, and what do we leave for those we love? Can objects or even words represent or capture a person, a place, a time—a home? Much of "The Tyger" is based in reality, and I explore these questions through themes of family, forgiveness, legacy, and, of course, home.
Tell me about the last time you returned to the place you consider home. How much of its definition is reliant on people?
The lines between "home" and "away" are so blurred at this point, I'm not sure if I could really tell you. I'm at home right now in South Carolina, but I miss my school and my friends. When I'm at college, I miss my family. I consider myself to have not just one home, but a collection of home-places and home-people, and I would hope that this wide sense of belonging and my gratefulness for it appears in my writing.
I suppose I don't think "home" as a place can be disentangled from the people who inhabit it. The people we call home can be with us (literally or figuratively) anywhere, and with them they bring the sense of home, the memory of the place and time. Inversely, when we are in the home-place, we feel with it the memory of the home-people.
What did writing “The Tyger” as fiction allow you to say that other genres wouldn’t have?
Well, to start off, my grandfather is not actually dead. I wrote a funeral story about someone I love who is still living, because I was curious about what remains of a person once they are gone. To understand legacy and inheritance in the context of my life, I imagined a scenario in which my family inherits significant bits and pieces of my mystical, magical grandfather and tries to assemble those pieces into a representation of him. My fiction is often based in reality, sometimes to the point of becoming "autofiction," because I find that the best stories and the best characters are the ones most full of life.
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The Tyger
Audie Waller | Fiction, Homing
I never felt anything like I felt my grandfather’s death. My father had died the year before, and then I had known every sensation. I was sad that my father had suffered at the end, but not overly sad at the death itself. I was disappointed that I had never loved him very much, had never lived with him or received from him fatherly guidance. If he’d tried to guide me I really think I might have listened. Or if I hadn’t, there would have at least been something between us at my resistance. The truth was there was nothing to mourn. I wrote all this down in my journal at the time. I talked to my friends about it, sometimes earnestly, sometimes not, saying things like “as far as dead parents go, it could be a lot worse.” Some people, I thought, felt worse for me than they would have if I’d been in pieces over it. These were the kinds of people who liked to think they were deeply emotional, and liked to tell me that it was okay to be sad. There were other people who understood me better and listened without offering advice. I think that if I’d had a therapist, which I didn’t and never have, they would have spent too much time on the subject. All this to say, I lost little at my father’s death. And when my grandfather died on a warm Wednesday in March, I was entirely unprepared.
It came out of the blue. These were my mother’s parents; they were healthy; they stayed active. They’d had their children young, and I was not yet twenty when he died. It came as a shock. It hit me in the throat. The funeral was in South Carolina, though most of his family—our family—had to fly in from Texas. All three of his brothers were there, and their wives, and most of their children. His mother was still alive, and she was the smallest person I had ever seen. She was like the curl of smoke when you blow out a candle. His sister was there alone, now fully entrenched in the part of her life consigned to mourning—her father three years dead of cancer, her husband gone to suicide, and now her brother, in the relative youth of his early seventies, without bothering to warn anyone. My mother’s older sister Heather was there with her two girls. That was the only thing that got me when he died, the only thing that kept me interested—wondering whether Heather would be there. He and Heather had had a falling out almost ten years before. I’m told it was something about her new boyfriend keeping guns in the house or trying to baptize her daughters, informing them that their bodies were not theirs, they were God’s. Something like that. I was there, at my aunt’s house, on the day when it really went down. I seem to remember her screaming “I hate you!” and throwing something at the car as my grandparents and I drove away down a dirt road, but I can’t say whether this memory is real or constructed. I couldn’t have been older than seven or eight. I’m told that for years after my grandparents sent her letters and cards, sent her girls birthday and Christmas gifts, and never heard a word in return. It made me sad and also fascinated me. How could it be that it took so little? I always thought I wouldn’t cut off my mother even if she strangled a puppy or shot up a school or something. She would still be my mother. She cried when we got the news, but only once. My mother was not a crier. She sat stoic at the funeral, and though I caught some redness in her face I never saw tears. Or else she hid them very well. I was paying attention. When they were children, my aunt made my mother a cup of Nesquik, half of which my mother had already drunk before she realized that the lumps she had swallowed weren’t clumps of undissolved chocolate powder but floating baby scorpions, which became apparent when she spotted the giant mother scorpion at the bottom of the cup, her body spanning its diameter. How many little girls could say they’d drunk scorpions? My grandfather said that’s what made my mother so mean. And my grandmother—my poor grandmother. She was not a weak woman, but I couldn’t imagine her pain. She was everything he was not, and vice versa, and together they made something complete and perfect, even if they did lose one daughter and calcify the other. My grandmother had been severed. Half of her was gone. She was alone like a single sock or a wing, something that has no use when there’s only one of them. They had been married fifty-four years.
I had been in class when I got a call from my mother. It was one of the two classes I liked. It was the only class, in fact, for which I felt I’d done everything right—made an impression on the professor, stayed interested during lectures, completed everything on time, even made friends with the girl who sat beside me. In the spring semester of my first year of college I felt that I was, if nothing else, getting used to it. I declined the call. As the minutes passed, however, my chest got hot and I began to fill with dread, and I knew in that way that we sometimes just know—something was wrong. When I called her back and heard the news, all I thought was, What do I do now? No reaction felt appropriate, so I hardly reacted at all. My chest burned.
The funeral was at a lake. It was a beautiful day. There were birds everywhere, newly home, I imagined, from their tropical winters. There were frogs, too, or maybe toads, tiny ones that could be clovers or nutshells until they started moving. There were yellow dandelions and their puckered green counterparts, unopened yet; there were daffodils—white, purple, yellow, pink. The trees weren’t yet leafy but were full of tiny green buds like promises. The sky was blue. It really was beautiful. We sat in white folding chairs like at an outdoor wedding, and where the altar would be was instead a long table, wooden and heavy-looking. He was cremated, so there was no coffin or grave or anything. On the table were four small urns, all shining metal but each slightly different, all etched and blown, with little gems in places that caught the sun. They were not lined up in a row but assembled in a diamond formation with nothing in the center. There were other things on the table—a copper-green sculpture of a dragon, a large wooden bowl that looked empty, a smaller metal bowl with a long thing sticking out of it, a latched wooden box, a crystal glass containing clear liquid, and his guitar. A candle burned on either end of the table, the flames never put out by the wind. In front of the table was one three-legged stool. All together it looked like his life, like a portrait of him. My grandfather had stopped being a person and had become an idea, an assortment of objects. It was like backing away from a pointillist painting to watch the picture come together, like if I stood far enough the scene would become my grandfather’s body. I shivered to think of how a change in perspective could transform one thing into another. Mounted behind the table was a painting I knew well: two monks before the night sky, watching the milky way turn in brilliant oranges and whites, the monks’ awe detectable from the backs of their heads, the positions of their hands and the way the wind caught their robes. The Chinese characters of my grandfather’s initials were inked red in the bottom left corner. My grandfather was not Chinese or Tibetan—he was Texan—but he had eastern fascinations. He and my grandmother once spent three months in Bhutan, and they returned with many treasures. I’m not sure whether he would have called himself a Buddhist, but his thinking was certainly of the Buddhist persuasion. He used to count birds for luck: the more you could see—not hear, but see—the better your day would go. He used to refer to his moods only as weather. “How are you?” you could ask, and you’d get only, “Blue skies,” or “Spring showers,” or “Thunder in the distance.” I imagined he must have had very specific instructions for this ceremony. I imagined whatever would happen here had never happened before.
First, a man in the front row stood from his seat. I did not recognize him. He was Asian and bald, wearing a long off-white robe that batted against him in the breeze. He never announced his title or his purpose. He lifted the metal bowl from the table and took from it the long thing, which was a sort of thick wooden drumstick, curved and tapered like a body. He tapped the stick against the edge of the bowl, then drew it around the circumference. It made a beautiful sound that guttered and rang with each movement of the stick. The bowl still singing, the man began to chant something in another language. His light robe seemed to circle his legs with the wind as he circled the bowl, and in my mind I saw him in the eye of some storm, still at the center of a spiral. I thought the chant repeated three or four times. It lasted maybe two minutes. The man set the bowl down and sat when he was done, never offering a translation. The Texans didn’t know how to react. Some had bowed their heads; others just looked around, not bothering to hide their confusion. I felt like I was taking a test for a class I wasn’t in. I was unprepared, but that was no surprise. I felt uneasy. I assumed at the time that the bowl and the chanting were components of a traditional Tibetan funeral, though when I tried to research it later I found results only on Tibetan “sky burials,” in which the deceased’s remains are dismembered and placed on a high pillar to be consumed by vultures. I imagined an interaction between my grandparents in which my grandmother gave my grandfather a look at his suggestion of a sky burial sufficient to take the idea out of the question. My mother once told me that much of her childhood was spent hearing things my grandfather said and looking to my grandmother for her reaction, which could fall anywhere between a confirmation and a derisively disapproving eye roll (but rarely an outright objection). She was a thermometer, able to take the temperature of his statements. He could tell a story, say, about the origins of the luck associated with a rabbit’s foot, and one glance at her face would tell you whether it was true or not, not because she knew the origins of the luck in a rabbit’s foot but because she knew when he was making something up. They knew each other like that. This is what I mean when I say she’d been severed.
Next, one of my grandfather’s brothers, the youngest, I thought, took the guitar from the table and sat on the stool. He played Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee.” His voice was rough like my grandfather’s, and he looked like my grandfather with longer hair and clearer eyes. There was always something misty in my grandfather’s eyes. When the brother finished the song, he sat there for a minute, not doing anything. The wind pushed his hair around. My grandfather was the oldest. He once told me a story of watching his siblings for the night as a kid, his parents elsewhere. The siblings mutinied, he told me, and dragged him into the yard. They tied him to a tree and left him there through the night, facing the house. He said he never saw the lights go out. His sister came out at dusk with a sandwich, which she fed him bite by bite, not untying his hands. He didn’t feel betrayed, he said. He felt alive. My grandmother wasn’t there when he told me that story, so I don’t know whether it was true or not. I thought of it watching his brother hang his head on the stool. There were sounds of quiet crying from the crowd. There were those, I thought, who wished to be seen crying, who let the tears gather before blinking so they could feel them on their faces, and there were those who meant to hold it in. I was crying, I realized, but there was something bright in my chest that was not sadness. The song was melancholy, evocative, and I imagined I had known it once. Staying with my grandparents as a child my grandfather would play for me often. All his songs were filled with feeling—most often longing, regret or deception, something desperate. You would feel it when he played. Even my grandmother would go quiet, listening for something she’d heard a hundred times. After a while the brother placed the guitar back on the table and returned to his seat.
I had begun to sweat. I don’t know when. It was this heat in my body, like the anticipation of something terrible. He already died, I reminded myself. The thing had already happened. Still I felt like the moments were rolling up and bunching together, rubbing against themselves and creating friction. I took a deep breath. Thunder in the distance.
Another brother stood and went to the front, holding a piece of paper folded into quarters. I knew little about him besides the fact that he was married to a Finnish woman. He was bald and more tan than my grandfather. He unfolded his paper in two movements and pinched it flat on either side. “The Tyger,” he said, “by William Blake.” He read the poem. I listened as closely as I could, looking for my grandfather in the lines. It was difficult to hear the words and not become lost in the rhymes, but what I knew the poem was doing was asking. He left us with a question.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
I was struck with something like panic. I managed to hold it together, but the poem was like looking into a grotesque face. It was terrible but important. It felt as though someone were holding my temples or cheeks, their hands soft but poised in such a way that I knew they would not let go. I read it over and over later. As far as I could tell the poem implies a lack of God or some fault in God, seeming to ask, Could something good create something evil? I thought not. I thought it was pretty much all twisted. What are good and evil but rationalizations of what has already happened? The artist creates beauty, but the beauty didn’t come from nowhere. It’s like a translation. That doesn’t make it good. If the picture was painted, it couldn’t have gone any other way. If lightning strikes, it’s because it was always going to.
The brother read the poem loud enough for all to hear, but his voice was like wind or something rushing—water between rocks, air between teeth. There was this movement to it, as if the words were desperate to leave him. He did not linger when he was done. I assumed he was the most poetic of the siblings but had not volunteered for this performance. I was sure my grandfather had orchestrated every piece. This was his ceremony, and they were doing it his way. The poem brought fewer audible tears than the song had, which didn’t surprise me. It was not a sad poem. I felt that my grandfather was hidden inside of it, and to uncover him would require work. I felt unnerved. As I had so many times throughout the ceremony, I saw him in my mind then how I saw him as a child. I’d always held a vague belief that he was a werewolf. I’m still unconvinced that there was no truth there. He had this mask—the most terrifying mask I had ever seen. It was a wolf’s mask, but the face was not furry; it was soft and pink and brown, much more human than wolf. Hair covered the top of the mask and the ears, and the expression was a vicious snarl. The lips were dark, almost bloody, and whiskers grew jagged from the pink cheeks. Deep wrinkles framed the animal eyes and mouth. My mother told me that when she and her sister were children, living in the bare Texas country, my grandfather would put on the mask and stuff a pillow into the back of his shirt, making himself a hunchback. He would go out in the night on no particular occasion and make noises outside the house. He’d start a ways back, rustling grass and crunching fallen branches. Then he’d creep toward the house. He’d scratch his fingernails along the walls and tap on windows, all the while growling and snapping, my mother and her sister shaking in their beds. I shivered to imagine. Even if there’s no evil, there will always be fear. I could feel it now.
After the poem the Asian man in the robe stood again. He spoke in English this time.
“Charles is gone,” he said. “And in life he leaves his body and possessions.” He lifted one of the urns from the table, the one set back furthest from the mourners, closest to the lake. It was a lighter color than the rest, silvery, inlaid with white gems. “To his mother, Vunita,” the man said, “he gives his body.” The man brought the urn to my great grandmother in slow steps, his robe flapping. As we watched him it felt like the world was watching too—the birds, the frogs, the sky, all with their eyes on the man and his urn. My great grandmother took it from him and held it in both tiny arms, pressed it against her chest. The man returned to the table. He lifted the urn on the right and it glinted gold in the sun, glowed almost, the designs worked in its curves folding the light. “To his wife, Laura,” the man said, “he gives his body.” He brought the golden urn to my grandmother, and she took it into her lap. I watched her trace her finger along its patterns as the man returned to the table. He took the front urn closest to us, coppery green like the dragon with jewels of many colors. “To his daughter, Shannon, he gives his body.” He brought the urn to my mother, who took it with one hand and stared down at it. She turned it, scrutinized it, assessed it. Finally the man lifted the last urn, the one on the left. It was dark, bronzy and set with black stones that might have been obsidian. “To his daughter, Heather, he gives his body.” My aunt took the urn without looking at it, without looking at the man or anything else, really. She seemed intent not to see.
Now I was tense and getting tenser. As each woman took her urn, it was like he lit up, like the part of him that was in each of them—his mother, his wife, his daughters—glowed. Not like a stove or a hearth, but like a star—something that can’t be controlled. I didn’t understand what I was feeling, which was unusual. I was sure of who I was. I was generally sure of things. This was one of my good qualities that I knew to be true—I could make sense of my world. I had to understand things to accept them, and even when they made me angry or felt unfair, I usually could. It’s something I was proud of. But now I felt confused, tricked. I felt lost.
His sister was given the copper dragon. The three brothers received the guitar. They accepted their gifts silently. Now all that was left on the table besides the singing bowl was the latched box, the large wooden bowl, and the crystal glass with the clear liquid. The dedications had included the name and the gift up to this point—“To his sister, Susie, he gives his dragon”—but the pattern broke now. The man, standing before the table, his head and eyes shining, lifted the crystal glass. It was lovely, with a short stem and a mouth curled outward like a flower, carved and glittering with rainbows in the sun. He raised it so steadily that the liquid seemed not to move at all. “To his granddaughters, Veronica and Rose,” he said. He said nothing else before bringing my cousins the glass. They took it together, Veronica reaching with her right hand and Rosie with her left. They held it there between them, staying as still as possible. Veronica brought her face over the mouth and sniffed, an orange curl brushing the rim. She looked up at Rosie, and judging by her expression she’d discovered nothing. No wrinkled nose or little smile or sudden movements—nothing. I wondered what they would do with it. I saw in my mind the glass on a shelf, encased in a faintly enchanted bell jar like the beast’s rose, perfectly still, the liquid never to evaporate or be consumed by the world in any other way. I entertained briefly the idea that if I had inherited the elixir I would drink it, though I most certainly would not. My grandfather had been an anesthetist, and I imagined the concoction poured into an IV bag and hooked up to an arm, mixing with blood and becoming the body. He called himself—adding the Greeks to his pantheon—a “little Charon.” With anesthesia, he’d row you on his boat to the center of the river and stick his paddle in the mud. Once you’d felt the pull of the current, heard the whispers against the hull, perhaps felt a ghost hand graze your arm as you leaned over the side, he’d turn you around and take you back to shore. There was so much my cousins didn’t know. They’d been deprived of my grandfather’s magic. Watching their hands on the glass, their faces deciding what to do next without speaking, I felt truly sad. The heat, for a moment, dissipated.
Then the man was at the table, holding the latched box, and the feeling was back. It was as long as his forearm and as wide and tall as his neck. The wood was simple, unvarnished and without design. The latch was the kind that looked like a comma or a phone in its cradle. The box was so raw that I thought my grandfather might have made it himself in his woodshop, which was entirely possible. The man held the box and looked at me. Before I heard his voice, I heard the birds, the hush of the lake, the frogs and crickets coming to a head. I might have imagined this crescendo. I don’t know. “To his granddaughter, Catherine,” he said. As he approached me I thought, How does this man know us? I had never seen him before in my life. Had he studied photos of us before the ceremony? He hadn’t asked a single person’s name. He hadn’t spoken to anyone, as far as I could tell. He presented the box to me, leaning down and looking me in the eye. His robe brushed my shin. The sun haloed his face. I took the box, looked down at it and then back up at him, and he told me not to open it here, but he never spoke. I heard it anyway. I held the box, and I burned. I was on fire but no one could see it. If I knew that I was on fire, I thought, if I acknowledged it, then I could live with it. I brought the box to my face and inhaled. It was cedar, and I knew that somehow, though I knew nothing about wood or trees. I thought of a necklace someone had carved for my grandmother, the smell of a soft cedar bird. I touched the latch with my thumb. It was cold, but not very. Whatever was inside was mine, was Catherine’s, and I hugged the box to my body the way my great grandmother had with the urn. Warmth took over. The sun touched me. The birds and crickets and frogs would die before long, even the ones so tiny they could barely be seen, but there would always be birds and crickets and frogs here, later iterations of earlier generations, different bodies from the same material. I liked that. There would always be another spring.
As the monk returned to his table, I saw in my mind a reflection of my grandfather. I was looking at him in a pool, a window, an eye. In the reflection he was himself but did not look like himself, and I was accosted by another memory. There were several times—all at night, I believe; none before the sun had set—when he brought his face close to mine, telling me to watch without opening his mouth. I watched, and he closed his eyes so tightly I thought they might be crushed. Then he pressed his hands over his eyes and cheeks and made tiny circular motions with them, pushing and pulling the skin of his face in every direction, like he was rubbing something in. This lasted maybe ten seconds or less, and when he removed his hands he looked different. His hair and the wrinkles of his skin were the same, but he no longer looked like a man. His eyes were larger and darker, his nose firmer, his lips narrow and curled. It could have been an illusion. He had many tricks. But this one—it terrified me. I was paralyzed. Looking through those dark eyes he wore, he knew what kind of fear I felt, what kind of burning stillness. It was a little like now. Like I was on fire. He no longer looked like a man, but he still looked like my grandfather—perhaps more recognizably than ever. After some time, I don’t know how long, he would look at the ground and shake his head, really shake it, like one animal with another in its teeth. When he looked back up he was himself again, like he’d flung off a mask. He’d smile at me and the world would go on. I don’t know how many times I witnessed this. I don’t know how many times I thought of it after. It seemed to me, there in the white folding chair, holding the rough cedar box, that I’d just remembered a dream.
Later, I sat alone in my grandfather’s woodshop, cross-legged on the floor. The reception was at their house. There was food and drink and people everywhere—people wanting to talk to me, wanting to console me, wanting me to console them. I held the box in my lap. Most of those bestowed with treasures at the ceremony still carried them. All four women held their urns under their arms, though they could have left them in their cars. Even Heather. Even my great grandmother, who looked like the urn weighed more than her. The brothers took turns playing the guitar. The only one I stayed to hear was “House of the Rising Sun,” played perfectly, grittily, mournfully by the brother who had not performed at the ceremony. I heard my grandfather there clearly. My cousins carried the glass between them the entire time, moving together, breathing together. They looked like the illustration on a tarot card. I almost wanted to take a picture of them, but some images are only for the mind to remember. I talked to them a little, my estranged cousins. I didn’t get to know them. I didn’t even learn their plan for the water in their cup. It was worth a try. The only one not physically holding her gift was the sister Susie, whose green dragon was probably too heavy for comfort. Instead she placed it on the table with the food like it was a vase of flowers and never left the room. I had looked for the monk man as well, but he was nowhere to be found. And so there I was, hiding in the woodshop. The building was set back in the yard, behind a curtain of trees. If you didn’t know it was there you would never notice it. The floor was covered in sawdust, loose nails and screws and bolts like fallen acorns. Just how he left it. I touched the latch of the box. It was warm now, heated by my body, just by being so close to me. I opened it. The hinges made no sound. There was no resistance. The texture was the same inside the box as out—raw, untouched. Inside were two things, neither large enough to fill the space so that when the box moved they slid across the bottom. The first thing was a brown piece of paper folded in half, one edge torn and jagged like it had been ripped from something. I unfolded it. Written in my grandfather’s hand:
Dear Cat,
We come to know ourselves better by forgetting what we know. Be wild.
That was it. I was sick of riddles. I almost rolled my eyes, but then I thought that’s what my mother would have done, so instead I laughed—not harshly or anything, just because I could. The second thing was dark and soft, rolled up and tied that way by two pieces of rough twine, but I knew at once what it was. I unbound and unrolled it, lifting it to face me. The wolf mask. It was as terrible as I remembered. Fleshy to hold, with a strong, ugly smell. I put it on. It sagged but held, the elastic straps worn. The smell was worse on the inside and the texture was awful against my skin. There was something comforting about it. The eyeholes were not open but walled with mesh—the outside world was visible, but separate from me. I stood so quickly I almost lost my balance and went to the open door of the woodshop. I could have been imagining it, but I thought that the world regarded me differently than it had when I stepped into the woodshop. More attentively, maybe. The birds and tiny frogs were here as they were at the lake, and I thought for a moment that they stopped to look at me in my disguise. In fact, one bird landed on a windowsill of the woodshop, about an arm’s length from me. She cocked her head and chirped, and I must have moved too quickly because she flew away in fear. I was like a monster or a freak—first a curiosity, then a threat.
The final act of the ceremony was this: the bald man had taken the candles from both ends of the table, holding one in each hand, and brought them to the painting. It was my favorite painting of my grandfather’s; I had even told my mother so once. The man held each candle at the two bottom corners of the canvas (there was no frame) until the flames caught. They caught at the same time, more easily than I thought they would. Everyone watched. No one breathed. The wind was gone. The flames caught, and I thought the painting must have been covered in something that made it so. They crept up the sides like orange fingers, and we could hear it. Then they worked over the painting itself, and in the heat the varnish melted and rolled away like tears. The initials burned first, then the monks—their robes, the backs of their heads, everything—and then the galaxy. The creator’s mark, then the beholders, then the vision: the swirling, unthinking galaxy, aflame already from its own imagined fire. It almost seemed right to watch it burn. Only when the flames had reached the ground and the structure began to collapse did the man take the huge wooden bowl from the table, fill it with water from the lake, and douse the fire. It took only one bowlful. When the fire was out the man stood before us, his hands clasped in front of him, and gave a shallow bow. Then, without a word, he walked down the center aisle and left. I imagined him getting into a car somewhere and driving away. That was funny. Although I thought it was equally likely that he would continue walking forever, or would just turn to dust, disappear. And that was it. It was over.
Standing in the doorway of the woodshop, looking out through the wolf’s eyes, I thought of all the things my grandfather touched. And why not leave us with something to think about? The gifts, the poem, the fire. Why not challenge us, tease us? I stepped out of the shop and made for the house. I was on fire. A handful of the mourners had left, I thought, but most were still there. I skirted the pool and approached the sliding door. There were two clusters of people outside like stands of bamboo, balancing paper plates of cheese and crackers and grapes with plastic champagne flutes, and they stilled in their gossipy grieving as I passed, pausing their conversations about the house or the will or the sickness to take me in. I said nothing, opened the sliding door and went inside. People turned to look. Some thought it was a joke and smiled. Some were embarrassed. Most, after they’d seen me, returned their gaze as quickly as they could to wherever it had been before. My cousins almost spilled their potion when they saw. My aunt, sitting on the couch, talking to someone, looked at me with sharp stones in her eyes, still talking, still facing the person she was talking to, like she knew what kind of trick I was playing and she wasn’t falling for it. My great grandmother then, still hugging her urn, was like a real matriarch or a venomous insect, and where there was no red mark on her back there was a warning written in the lines of her face. And then there were my mother and my grandmother standing in the kitchen, talking to one another, filling glasses of water. I came up behind them. My grandmother turned and leapt back, practically yelped. She was really afraid. My mother saw me and put her hand on her chest.
“God, Cat,” she said. “You scared me. I thought you were somebody else.”