Instructions for Assembly

1

My grandma had smoke in her heart. All up in her heart. Sometimes she bled a little of it when outside got cold, and her mouth opened up dragonlike into the gray winter air. She bled out her smoke-breath and/or coughed, and/or laughed: and if laughter, it came out sounding like a cackle. Her skin looked to be sliding off her face-bones. It was funny, until it wasn't.

I'd say, Granny your skin's falling off right down on to the floor! And touch her wrinkled cheek. And she'd hack up some laugh noises and boil noodles for dinner.

That was when it was funny, when even Mama, who's always been hawk-sharp with brown-eyed concern, thought the game amusing. Then my grandma started peeling away from herself, caving in like a rotten peach.

That was when she told me about the smoke in her heart, and said, You have it too, you know, all us women do.

Not a warning, just bestowing facts. There are holes in a body where only smoke can survive.

Granny died and Mama's brown eyes got sharper, her nose/brow-ratio more hawk-like. Now the Big House was all our own, even though it was still coated in Granny's wallpaper, her white kitchen towels strewn out vaguely dirty-damp all over the place. When Mama and I had the Big House all to ourselves, she let me draw on the walls, as long as I promised to draw nice things. I drew boats, flowers, and swimming pools, juice boxes and pocket change. I drew clouds that were secretly brains. I drew raindrops falling from the actually-brain-clouds that was actually brain goo. I wanted to draw people or animals but had no way to know for sure whether or not they'd be nice.

Mama tore down the wallpaper when Howard came to live with us. When the wallpaper came down, the Big House started to smell like metal. It started to smell like a nosebleed. I told Mama I didn't want Howard to live with us in the Big House, that it was Big enough for just the two of us and no one else. I told her I wanted the wallpaper back, and Granny.

Mama's eyes got deep, like the muddy sky too long past bedtime. She spoke quiet. Behind her tongue I saw a flicker of brilliant red, a red so pure-bright it made my teeth ache. She had a cardinal wet and strangling in her throat, and when she talked, I could hear it trying to flap its way out. She mentioned milk and eggs, how there hadn't been any since Granny got rotten and went into the ground.

She said, This is how you scrape together a life.

2

Howard's eyes were sand-colored somehow, even though I know that when he came to us, they were blue. Mama says she knew them to be blue. Howard was the first bad man I knew, mostly because he was the first man I had ever known, and he wasn't all that bad, really, just reckless with his hands. So he took to shaking things, like Mama, who had gone all bones and feathers. Her ribcage more cage than rib, more sky than nest. The cardinal inside of her was a secret we kept, a sad, hopeful understanding between us. Sometimes it seemed like she was keeping the secret even from herself. Like when I'd be sitting with the door open, and she'd float down the hallway without noticing she had even been there. Hawk-eyes dim and ruin-dark, staring straight ahead, a clumsy kind of flying.

Downstairs with Howard the walls would rock, some noise shattering on the tile. And the front door flown, gaping out at the whole beaming wound of the world. Later, I'd find Mama kneeling in a prayer of broom and dustpan, scrape-scrape-scraping slivers of fractured light from the floor, gathering up the sharp stray pieces of our life.

3

Goose...