“Finding What Kills” by Rayni Wekluk
Gran yawns. She’s tired. “I’m lucky to have made it this long. I can’t help but think this is all fate. The way things end up.”
I don’t know what to say; I can’t disagree. I roll over in my bed and watch my shadow mimic me in the lamplight. Gran’s got cancer in her pancreas and it’s going to kill her. She’s confused that she survived being the daughter of an immigrant, speaking only Spanish in mid-century America, getting married at fifteen to an abusive alcoholic, and raising eight kids on her own after the divorce, yet cancer is how she’s going to die.
“I don’t believe in fate, Gran,” I tell her. She sighs. “I believe in the end goal. Where we want to be.”
“Oh,” her voice breaks, “I don’t want to be sick.” I hear Jerry, her second husband, tell her it’s time to take a pill.
“I don’t want you to be sick,” I say.
Silence. She swallows the pill.
“This reminds me of the summer when–”
“Yes,” I chuckle. I’m reminded, too, of being thirteen. Of weighing sixty-nine pounds and sitting in the passenger seat of her gold Honda. I hear her sobbing. I see holes I seared into the glovebox with my stare to avoid her eyes. She tells me I’m like Karen fucking Carpenter. I’ll die of heart failure from starving myself. She doesn’t want me to die. Eat, she begs. I’m back in the present. The “A” word is on the tip of my tongue, but I tell her: “Of the summer when you taught me to cook for myself.”
Gran doesn’t chuckle, “This is different than that was, though.” Her tears slide through the phone down my cheek. “You were so young, had barely lived. I’ll be eighty this month.”
“You saved me,” I sniffle, “I can’t save you.”
“No.”
I imagine her in her bed. See her tufts of buzzed gray hair that once was as thick and black as tar against the quilted pillow. She has fuzzy socks on. Her rail-thin body bobs up and down beneath her comforter like a fallen branch adrift in the sea—the slow breath of a slow death.
“This is right,” she tries to convince me. “I lived, lived, lived, and I’ve found what’ll kill me.”
“It’s not right,” I begin.
“Yes. Everybody dies.”
Another silence.
She breaks it, “You’re living now. Wait as long as you can to find out how you do.”
I chuckle again.
“I mean it, girl.”
“I know.”
“I’ll feed you from the grave.”
“I know,” I say again. “I know.”
Rayni Wekluk is a poet currently studying at The University of Nebraska at Omaha. She is in her third year as both an English and Creative Writing major and will graduate in 2025. Her work has previously appeared in 13th Floor, two anthologies by The Moonstone Arts Center, Collision Literary Magazine, and The Oakland Arts Review. She utilizes observable reality and humor to portray aspects of the human condition within her work.
