A Greatest Grandmother

The Fille once spun under brilliant lights in strong arms. Now her head spins and her body hunches even further with coughs. The velvet dress hanging loose on her bones is balding and mottled by the last eighty generations of moths. The undertaker would never see the pricks left her hands by the softly twinkling hairpins, but he would struggle with pen stuck between the rings on her fingers. Her great granddaughters in their fitted jeans and straightened hair would celebrate missing school for the funeral. Each would be bestowed the last of the Fille's remains: a necklace orphaned of its story of love and tragedy, a chest containing heaps of illegible letters, rings in shining colors, a red velvet dress. The lawyer would insist against their scorn that this is what their great grandmother wanted. And just like that, a life would finally release its clench onto earth.