Sarah watches from her kitchen window as a woman picks through her trash. The backyard has no fence. The woman has steel- gray hair. It’s glamorously pressed and curled. It suits her sagged, but still very heart-shaped face.
She’s wearing a silk white nightgown, a lavender robe and kitten heels. There’s something meticulous about the way she sifts through the trash. Sarah watches the woman inspect a mostly empty jar of coconut infused hair-grease for several moments, before gently placing the bottle into the front pocket of her robe.
It’s six a.m. The whole South Minneapolis neighborhood is crisp with the silence of a hangover still lingering from a night of twenty-somethings, doing the things you expect twenty-somethings to do.
Sarah is a twenty-something. Most nights she cocoons her small frame into the welcomed warmth of her blanket and binges on Gilmore Girls from her laptop, greasing her scalp and braiding her thick textured curls into generous cornrows. That was her Friday evening.
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The sun streaks magenta in the sky as it climbs and shoos the night away. Sarah rubs a strip of exposed scalp with her finger, she wipes a bit of its oiliness off with her pajama bottoms before tugging the kitchen curtain back a little further.
Part of her wants to call someone--but there’s also the fear of the answer. And anyway, what would she say excuse me, officer, I’d like to report some random elderly lady picking through my trash? Plus, the woman looks so, so joyful there, sifting through that abandoned mess. Her whole frail body swaying to a rhythm Sarah can’t hear. Perhaps adulting means inviting the woman in for a cup of coffee or scrambled eggs and toast with strawberry jam. It would give her an excuse to say the word darling without looking like a complete asshole, and yes, she could chat the woman up about her life—an old-school doll like her leaving home at this hour (or just arriving) in full makeup and donning a silk gown like she was one brass band and a feather boa away from strutting her stuff. A woman like that must have several stories to tell--notorious half-truths about refusing midnight lovers and knowing how to pass a good time with a glass of brandy and them humid New Orleans summers and how nothing, not even the city could contain her. Sarah imagined a former life the woman might have held in that chain-smoking raspy voice she undoubtedly possessed.
For Sarah, the woman conjured a scattered and imagined nostalgia of what little she knew about her own grandmother before her grandmother fled up North like so many Black folks had in those days before she had married a sensible enough man with a sensible enough job. Before she abandoned the cello to hold instead children and grandchildren when the time came. Only the occasional prick of her record player’s needle against the vinyl’s dark surface hinting at her former life.
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Sarah’s housemates probably won’t be up for another six hours, so what’s the harm in offering a fresh cup of coffee? Just as she is about to turn to get the pot going, Sarah notices the woman’s hand. The left one. It’s unzipping the center of the woman’s copper forehead.
In one version of an imagined memory Sarah has of her grandmother, her grandmother is rubbing lavender-infused Vaseline into Sarah’s hands and forehead and humming a hymn she can’t remember the words to.
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She blinks. It’s still happening. The hand unzipping the woman slowly. Snail’s pace
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The woman has perfect stiletto red nails. They inch the zipper down a seam. That wasn’t there before, but clearly, it has always been there. The zipper slides past the woman’s cakey eyelids which have snapped wide open and are making direct eye-contact with Sarah. The eyes are lightning white. Sarah can’t look away from them as they tilt and lull further apart.
The zipper makes its way to the bridge of the woman’s powdered nose, edges through the cupid’s bow and down the middle of woman’s chin. It crawls to her neck. There is no sure way of knowing just how far it will go, but Sarah believes the zipper will split her body in half.
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In a different imagined memory of her grandmother, Sarah is older and her grandmother is 17 going on 35. The memory is foggy but what’s clear is there’s a thirst in both sets of their brandy colored eyes. One of them will try to warn the other of what’s to come. The warning is not prescriptive, it’s a dance disguised as a prayer or a spell.
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Is this now?
Is it moments later? There’s is a colorless blur fluttering out the unzipped crack of where the woman’s face used to be. Sarah can’t scream and feels terribly woozy. Terribly sleepy too.
The lights shut off. Even the sun is dimming. She hears a husky voice singing oh, when the Saints, oh when the Saint go maaaaarchiiiing innnn.
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Then again, she can’t be sure of anything. Before it goes completely dark, she feels the prick of a needle pressing into her finger. The finger bleeds.