The flesh of my grandmother, loosening also, that I would watch as I lay in bed and she undressed. How I liked her body. How I was repelled and comforted by it, disturbed by its capacity for pain, for blood that threatened the integrity of skin: the false teeth that she would shunt backwards and forwards in her bottom jaw like runaway carriages, the knife-edge callus on her little toe that she swore she preserved for the cutting of bread.

She promised me many things: a toe just the same, an amethyst ring when I reached sixteen, the secret of my treacherous best friend at twenty-one. None of which came to pass.

*