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I watched as old Aunt Emma lifted up her tattered hands and placed them in mine. I shivered as her wrinkled flesh lay in the grasp of my tighter, newer skin, almost feeling ashamed that it wasn’t me who was about to die.

“Rebecca,” she whispered.

I leaned in closer to listen to her raspy voice and smelled the age on her breath. The stench made my eyes close and I pulled away but she had a tight grip on my bones and yanked me closer.

“The similarities between me and tomorrow break my brain from all the thinking. I have endured much pain throughout my time here and it can only grow stronger in the days to come. I look forward to only yesterday because otherwise it is too much to bear.”

She gasped and choked for a second, then closed her eyes and loosened her hold on my arm. I snatched it back and watched her for a second before I left the room, still trying to shake off the guilt I was feeling.

Aunt Emma had been around for a long time but I knew her time was up. Emma-Leigh said she knew her momma was getting on in her age, but I don’t think she knew what I had known for days now: Aunt Emma was going to die tonight. I could feel it; in the way the air moved past my cheeks, the way the dog was barking at the sun and certainly from the broom falling, that meant company was coming and we never had anyone over. She was definitely going to be dead by midnight.


I opened the door to the kitchen to find Emma-Leigh and Cadence putting the silver underneath the counters. Uncle Edward was covering the big mirror in the dining room and I knew then that they felt it too.

“She spoke to me,” I whispered to Edward when he finished draping the thick stained canvas over my mother’s embellished gold frame.

“Shhh, child, do not repeat the words of the dying. Whatever she said, I hope you listened, because you will live your life knowing she chose to speak them to you.”

I stood there a moment, confused and a little bewildered because I hadn’t fully understood what she had meant by it all but Uncle Edward shoved me lightly out of the way while he and the women of the house finished getting ready for Aunt Emma’s departure.

“I could feel it in the winds tonight,” Brother said to me when it was just the two of us outside. He was older than me, not by much. Maybe all of a year but he was the sharpest seventeen year old you’d ever meet. He was going to college and he was going to do something extraordinary and he said that one day, so would I, even though all I wanted to be was a writer.

“I could too,” I told him, picking some of the monkey grass that lined the edges of the pond. “I told Uncle Edward that she said something to me but he said I can’t repeat it.”

Brother looked at me for a long time and then sighed,”Would you tell me?”
Pursing my lips together I shrugged and answered honestly,”I don’t think I could really explain it. I couldn’t even tell you what she meant by it.”

He smiled, then relaxed and leaned back in the tall grass. “You would tell me if you remembered though, right?”

I laughed and poked him in his side. “Of course I would.”