I DON’T KNOW WHY
Published by Dwayne Albert Bearup at Smashwords
Copyright 2012 Dwayne Albert Bearup
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Granny’s demise began in the kitchen. She was baking and, as was customary for her on a pleasant spring evening, had the window cracked to let the heat out. That must be how the fly got in.
Granny was a singer, after a fashion. Mostly church hymns and folk music - “none o’ that modern noise” - but her voice was tuned for hillbilly ballads and she liked to sing them to herself while baking, or cleaning house, or laundering her “silkies” in the kitchen sink. As she whispered it to me later, on her death-bed, “I was beltin’ out some Lo-retta… end o’ one verse I inhaled for the next while turnin’ ta the stove and HUP… in it went.”
“So, you inhaled a fly. That’s why you’re so sick?”
She shook her head, coughed up some blood, then shivered all over for a minute. I didn’t like the way she was sweating when her hand on my arm was so clammy and cold, but Doc Farnsworth said talking wouldn’t hurt her, and since it would be her last act in this world I was letting her tell her story.
“I felt it hit the back of my throat as it turned south so I tried to reverse direction and blow it out again. Di’n work. After, I could feel it crawlin’ down my windpipe.”
“Ew. Then what did you do?:”
“I couldn’t get it out, so I helped it on its way with a glass of water and went back to my pie.”
“Ick. That’s gross, Gramma. So, that’s why you’re so sick, then. From swallowing that fly?”
“No sweetie, that was yesterday, and it was just a little fly. I felt fine after. Least, ‘til evenin’ come and I felt it still crawlin ‘round in my belly. Oh, I just knew it was in there layin’ eggs, honey, and I got scared. I heard terrible stories about that sort of thing, just terrible.”
She coughed up some more blood, and now I could see her throat was swelling some, making it hard to breathe. I got up to fetch the doc, but her hand on my arm became a steel vice. She was still coughing, the deep kind of cough that leaves your ribs aching - also known as coughing up a lung. Granny shook her head and glared at me when she wasn’t wincing in pain, so I reluctantly sat back down to hear the rest.
When the fit subsided I replaced the sodden paper towel with a clean one, wiped the blood off her lips and chin and asked, “So, what happened?”
“I went out to the woodshed, coaxed the widow out of her web and sent her in to fix the problem. It didn’t work as expected.”
In the end, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
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