There is water in the basement.

A pooling putrescence, obscuring the legs of your mother’s antique nightstand, the one with the missing handle, the one that doesn’t match the bedroom suite that you’ve got on layaway.

I stand on the stairs, surveying my shallow, fetid surroundings and I imagine my grandmother’s face. I picture her at the flea market, moving deliberately among the curios, longing for what she left behind. 

I imagine her running her hand across the nightstand, tracing her slender fingers over the gold leaf embellishments, pulling the brass handles to check and see if there was anything left in the drawers, if her photos had made it across space and time and landed here, off of route 25, in an overseas unknown.

We didn’t know she had been dying for a long time. A demise brought on by heartache and cancer, tears flooding into skin, swelling her bones like the legs of the nightstand in this sorrowful submerged basement.

For the next several hours we’ll wait for the waters to recede, and then restart the process of her erasure.