Day 51: Grandma has a Wolf’s Heart

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The newly fallen leaves stacked poorly in her hand.  These red and yellow and gold leaves retained their suppleness.  This natural, nearly flesh-like offering, contrasted her brittle metalic fingers.  The leaves’ tones wavered through the various shades of autumn.  Their organic patterns occasionally punctuated with a spot of green or a tear or an insect-made hole.  Haphazard symmetry drew my eyes to the web of veins branching from larger to smaller paths and out to the rim.  The brown wind-worn edges showed the future for each.

Her knuckles were stamped and folded tin.  I hadn’t seen a tinker of this generation outside of picture books.  I would have expected a rime of [chemical name here] darkening the simplistic joints, but she seemed greased and newly made.  I knew she wasn’t.  Her arthritic posture and shuddering movements betrayed her age.  The gleam of her naive but precise frame was the result of care not recent making.

When I did not immediately take the leaves, she spoke.

“Take them or I will unmake you.”

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