Mama Leone Read Free Page A

plan. They shouldn’t have given him the laxatives. His heart turned into a rag, into an old scrap of a rag for washing the floor . The gnome gave me the evil eye. I felt lost in this terrifying world. So it is, fairy tales don’t lie after all: my grandpa died without a heart, in its place was a dirty, ugly, smelly square rag like the one we kept next to the toilet seat. I wanted to howl for the horror of it all, but couldn’t.
    From that day on, whenever I’d go pee, I was scared I was going to pee my soul out. I watched the jet stream, white or yellow, or really yellow when I was sick. I didn’t know what a soul looked like, but I was sure I’d recognize it if it whizzed out. Days went by and it still didn’t show. Then months. I asked Grandma what a soul looked like. She said a soul doesn’t look like anything, that it was just a word for something you couldn’t see. Can you poop your soul out? I asked, trying to find out what I wanted to know, but trying to hide where all this was coming from, to avoid admitting I knew Grandpa was dead and any opportunity for her to mention it. What do you mean can you poop your soul out? she asked, nonplussed. I mean, when you poop your soul out and die, so you don’t exist anymore , I said like it was common knowledge and highly unusual that she didn’t know anything about it. You mean, can someone die on the toilet? I think you can, but people don’t usually die there . . . Where do people usually die? . . . In bed or traffic accidents, or they die in war or earthquakes . . . And the soul, what happens to the soul? . . . Nothing, the soul disappears . . . How can something that exists disappear? . . . Just like jam, it gets used up and disappears . . . Does the soul disappear inside you or go outside and then disappear? . . . Where would it go, it doesn’t have anywhere to go, it’s not like a dog being let out. It disappears, ceases to exist, end of story . . . So all in all, you can’t poop your soul out? . . . Not a chance, I don’t know where you got that idea from .
    This set my mind at ease some. I peed fearlessly and didn’t bother looking at the whiz anymore. If you can’t poop your soul out then you can’t pee it out either. Mom had been talking nonsense to Auntie Mina.
    Six months after Grandpa’s death, Grandma and Mom suddenly stopped wearing black. It was a Sunday, Uncle and Dad had come over. The table was set with a fancy white tablecloth, like it was someone’s birthday or someone was getting married. Today we remember Grandpa , Uncle said. I pretended this was normal, like I didn’t remember him every day. Maybe I lie when I play Ustashas and Partisans by myself because I’m not a Ustasha or a Partisan and because one person can’t be two people at the same time, but they lie worse when they remember Grandpa today, getting out the special plates, cutlery, and glasses, walking around the house in their ties, not taking off their shoes when they come in, doing all the things they never otherwise do and lying that they don’t remember him every day. How could they not remember him when he was here all the time, when it was just recently and they haven’t forgotten anything, and his umbrella is still there by the coatrack. I was scared of their lies. The lie is alive, I thought. It swallows things up and makes everything different from what it is.
    First we’ll have a teeny-weeny bit of soup , said Mom. She always talked like that when she remembered I was there. When she forgot, thenshe’d cuss and talk all serious. And then we’ll have the suckling. I got it from Pale, it’s not even five months old , said Dad. I looked at Grandma. She sat there smoking quietly. Uncle was talking about dam-building in Siberia.
    My heart started pounding like crazy. Everyone sat there polite as pie reminiscing about Grandpa and waiting for it to arrive – the thing