Heartbreak or War

When my grandmother was a little girl she dragged her toes to bend the straws of hay to keep the blood from her shadows on the long walk home and my mother told me that when she was a little girl,
she learned to walk in a graveyard.
It’s not my grandmother’s fault you see her child died and then her husband died and then her brother died and now she
wants to
because that’s what everyone else is doing they’re dying. Maybe she thought spending Sunday afternoons amidst tooth-like gravestones would sharpen her soul into a ghost. Maybe her soul-shavings were absorbed by my angel mother or maybe God decided little girls who drag their toes and become old women in cemeteries don’t get to die just
Yet but then my brother and I were born and for a moment,
the death chatter was silenced.

But now she starts again sometimes
you just wait she tells me it’ll either be cancer or heartbreak or war because she’s still talking about death as if it’s one of those birds that sits on your shoulder eventually you’d think you’d forget about the bird but
you can’t because
the longer it’s perched on your bone of a shoulder the tighter its little claws press into
your skin until finally there’s a red stain sitting in the bend of your elbow
and it’s got a trail.
I ask my grandmother what do you know about heartbreak you married the first and only love of your life.
My grandmother says heartbreak isn’t just someone breaking your heart it could be something. Like the time her childhood friend fell in love with an Australian soldier in 1946 Italy and the time the Australian soldier had to leave
in 1947.
She was heartbroken but he didn’t break it just like my grandmother’s heart shattered to fine shards of glass when my grandfather died
It wasn’t
his fault
It wasn’t
my mother’s fault
but now I bet she can still feel the fake petals framing the gravestones rub against her little girl toes.
My grandmother should have taught her to drag them.