Last look at my grandmother: a slim blue vase above the mouth of the fireplace. A final offering, a displacement of cinders.

A long time ago, she told me a story. When she was eight years old, living in rural Germany, she and two older boys came across three kittens in a ditch: mewling, clearly abandoned. The boys wanted to experiment on them—they had sharp sticks, rusty nails—but she screamed at them Don’t you dare. So one of the boys cut her instead, a slash on the arm. Predictably, the wound got infected. She cried in her bed, delirious with fever, the sheets turned translucent with sweat, and just when everyone thought she was going to die, her body fought it off. 

“I had mercy on the kittens,” she said, showing me. On her wrinkled arm, the scar tissue puckered like a disapproving mouth. “So God had mercy on me.”

I raised my eyebrows, because by that point I had already stopped believing in God, but I knew better than to say anything.

My grandmother never spoke about what happened during the war. Some secrets stayed unreachable, memories knitted closed like the scar on her arm. All I knew that by the time my mother was born my grandmother was long gone from Germany, out of there forever. But Germany would never be out of her.

Whenever I dream of my grandmother now, I picture her growing the tumor that killed her. She is lit from within, the clump of cells building in her skull, blooming white in the interior darkness: first the size of a zygote, and then turning to things the size of food—a pea, a cherry, an apricot—and finally something too large to be edible. Something almost like a fist. Maybe it bloomed there, in the airless dark. Maybe it shone out through the bone of her skull, lighting up her bedroom, lunar. Her own earthbound moon.

Eventually I move out of my mother’s house and to Chicago, a city that careens wildly between heat and cold, like it can’t figure out exactly how it wants to make your life miserable. My apartment is small and clean and pet-friendly, but I don’t get a cat. Something about them. I paint all the walls white, as if they might glow in the darkness. But they don’t, and a week later I paint them black. 

I imagine the true end to my grandmother’s story: the kittens dying not long afterwards, forgotten. After all, how could they survive without their mother? I can’t figure out why she never mentioned telling her parents where they were, or at least making sure someone took care of them so they wouldn’t starve. I can’t figure out why she acted like her story had a happy ending.

Sometimes I buy cigarettes, ignoring the raised eyebrows of the cashier, his low accented rumble You’re too beautiful to be buying these. I believe that my grandmother was beautiful, once, but eventually she wasn’t, and so it was fitting for her to die. Right?

Sometimes I snap my lighter into flame, touch it to one cigarette and then another, burn them all right down to their filters without so much as touching one to my lips. Smoke fills the air, curls over on itself as if indignant at the waste. No one else is here to smell it, so it crawls unnoticed and unremarked-upon into my surroundings. My hair, my clothes, the cracks in the paint: they all smell like poison.

My body is only the ellipsis of my ancestors, a continuation no one asked for.

Years pass and turn to layers on my skin and I don’t dream of my grandmother anymore. Instead I dream of crows coming down from the sky, a few at first and then more and more of them, descending in soft black sheets. They litter the fields, perch on my shoulders, talk to me in their dead voices. They tell me that my grandmother’s story was a fable meant to guide a child, and that she got the scar on her arm from something much worse: the careful burning away of six numbers stamped into her skin. The flame, the heat, the agony. An experience I could never even imagine. They tell me that there never was any such thing as mercy.

***

Amy DeBellis is a writer from New York. Her work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Flash Frog, HAD, Pinch, Monkeybicycle, and others. Her debut novel is forthcoming from CLASH Books in September 2024. Read more at amydebellis.com.