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SYNGENESOPHOBIA: THE FEAR OF RELATIVES
Dear Great Grandmother, You Could Have Been Less Terrifying
Then maybe I would have dared to ask for help
My great grandmother scared me.
On Halloween, she dressed up as a witch, and the family said, not unlovingly, “She gets to be herself today, ha ha ha.”
When her health declined, she lived in an apartment on the second floor of my grandparents sprawling farm house.
So many windows.
Dark windows.
But darkest was the one looking out on the driveway where the children played…
HER window.
Yes, all the other windows were dark, but great grandmother’s was darkness itself. It was the dark of black ice, and when we played too loud, when we made the mistake of letting the basketball touch the ground or laughing with our mouths open, we would hear it…
Knuckles on glass.
A smelling-salts sound, excellent for waking up brains that were so dumb they dared to doze in happiness.
The midnight sound of bones on glass.
And though this sound was scary all by itself, it was nothing compared with the message it…
