Horses for Fairies
(Written in respone to Paul Schonfeld's photograph "Cold Coffee")
http://www.messyscience.com/
By Jodie Liedke
Grandma stayed alive by prescribing herself two daily items: coffee and chocolate, coffee to keep her awake and chocolate to keep her soul sweet. The combination also happened to decrease the sporadic swelling of her Alzheimer’s.
Doctor Meyer said, “If it keeps working, do it. She’s old anyway. Not many years left in her.” That was the first time I had heard a doctor speak in “normal language,” but it also sounded like he was talking about a horse instead of my grandmother.
That summer when I went to visit Grandma, I watched her closely, waiting for her ears to point, her dentures to grow down and thick like Chiclets, and perhaps a muffled neigh to slip from her lips. All week, I waited for her to forget my name again and call me Allie, my cousin’s name, like she did a year ago. She didn’t. The coffee and chocolate had yet to hit its peak.
In the short Wisconsin summer, she took her coffee and chocolate outside on the patio in the morning. Coffee—always straight, no creamer, no sugar, nothing but blackness—and chocolate, always milk chocolate, no fancy filling. She told me years before how she and Grandpa had gone to McDonalds for breakfast when they were giving away free samples of what she called “crap” (a vanilla latte). “We tossed it before we even left the lot,” she had said. “They are always trying to ruin the good things in life.”
That Friday morning in July, she had had her coffee and box of chocolates on the patio as usual. Friday was her least favorite day because she’d have to wait a whole three days before “Young and the Restless” was on again (another “good thing” in life, according to Grandma).
It was three hours later when I had gone to check on her. She was slumped in her chair with her eyes shut; the red sand from Tomahawk’s roads had settled in her dyed box-blonde hair. Next to her, the box of chocolates was empty, and the ceramic coffee cup was half full. She was quiet. Grandma was never quiet. She always had something to say or someone to insult, especially the mail man. She always complained about not getting her mail; the post office was cheating her.
On the surface of the coffee lay what looked like a white butterfly, the kind I used to catch in the fields with my sister when we were little. We’d cup them in our hands and the let their wings tickle our palms as they flapped, trying to escape. We used to pretend the butterflies were like horses for fairies. Instead of holding on to the mane, the fairies held on to the butterflies’ antennas. This butterfly’s wings were spread flush along the coffee. Its tube body exposed upright so that the veins were clearly visible like a leaf’s.
It was positioned perfectly, almost too perfect. It was too perfect. I picked up the cup; it was still a bit warm. The butterfly, still alive, didn’t attempt to peel its antennas from the thick liquid or flap its wings. It just lay there, floating on top, waiting for someone to scoop it out with an index finger.
Grandma’s ears were small, not like other older people’s ears that had doubled, along with their noses. Her mouth was open in a squashed “O,” exposing her upper dentures that had fallen and now rested on her tongue.
I set the coffee cup back onto the wooden table that she had dribbled red paint on last summer. She had decided to paint the mailbox: “Damn post office keeps missing me. They won’t miss this though.” She held up the half painted mailbox. “No one misses red.”
I took a seat in the chair next to her where Grandpa used to sit six years earlier. I waited for Grandma to call me Allie, for the fairy to come back for her horse.
