Nan Nan

My grandmother lay in her bed.

"I feel too sick to sit," she told me.

My grandmother had nothing wrong with her, nothing that could be determined, anyway. She had a fragile mind and I watched it breaking as she got older.

"What'd you do today, Nan?" I sat on the chair near her bed. I should have sat on her bed with her but it scared me. It had swallowed her whole.

"Nothing, just lay here. Thinking about my life, all the people that have come in it. I have thought of every single person in my life."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Can't help but think about things, stuck here like this. I have known so many people. Even near-strangers I am thinking of. Most of them are dead now."

"It's funny how some people only come in for a short while, like they weren't meant to stay for long."

"But you never forget them. They come in and out but you never forget people."

She got up out of bed and for the first time in as long as I could remember, she didn't need my help.

Anna

"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."

...

My brother quit drinking and started having nightmares. We sat, as usual, at the diner up the street. He poured what looked like a million grains of salt on his eggs, one for every star in the galaxy.

"What do you dream about?"

He sighed and moved towards me like a secret. His thoughts hurt him, always had.

"Last night I dreamt of her."

She was his best friend, a beautiful girl he had fallen under when he as fourteen. He loved her so purely, the kind that is rarely returned. Even that young, she was a ghost-girl; already dead, see-through, not meant to be here. By the time they were twenty she was gone completely, this arm to that drug, that leg to that bad man.

"Why did she give herself away?" he asked me.

He needed her.

"I dreamt that I was in her house. Dad was helping her with something and then he got pissed off and started screaming at her. He left, disappeared like a cloud of smoke. I ran up the stairs and I found her all alone. She was so skinny, and she said, 'Don't leave.' I said, 'I won't.' And then she turned and looked at me, I've never seen someone so skinny, Katie. She said, 'Will you help me?' and I said, 'Help you with what?' and she said, 'The cancer.' She had cancer, I knew it in that dream way, like I had known it all along but not a second earlier. Isn't that fucked?"

"What do you think it means?"

"That I'm being like Dad by cutting her out. That she needs my help."

I took his hand.

"You did the right thing, Mike."

"Yeah," he nodded. "It's just a lot easier to stay out than get out, you know what I mean?"

I nodded.

"I just wish I could love someone like that again," he told me as he finished his coffee as if it was the first time, as if he hadn't told me that one hundred times before.

I hated watching the world strengthen the man in him, destroy the boy in him.