I blink and rub at my eyes. I fold my arms over my chest, willing the night terrors away. I don’t like to entertain fantasies, good or bad, give them room to breathe and grow, to spread like mold across the wrinkles of my mind. Moony always said an overactive imagination is just another gateway to sin.

She is as still and blank as paper. I cannot bring myself to step into the room.

I cannot go to her.

It occurs to me that I should be sad. That I should scream or cry or express some deep and troubled emotion. After all, Moony has practically been a mother to me for the last ten years. She won’t be here now to watch me graduate from college with a “sensible” degree, or remind me that art should have a point, or ground my wilder tendencies. But all I feel is a vacancy where the sadness should be and a brutal clarity that makes everything around me look sharper and brighter than normal. Like the faded, yellow-floral curtains pulled across her picture window that seem as though they’ve been drawn on with a highlighter. Or the edge of her cotton lampshade, where every speck of lint is rising like the hairs along my arm. As though this moment when my grandmother has died is more real than any other moment in my short life. Being just this side of seventeen, I would assume that there will be more moments like this one, more violently alive moments. And yet, I don’t believe it standing here.

I think this is the first time I’ve ever really seen Moony. Really noticed her sagging breasts like paperweights rolling off her ribs and the patches of white-pink scalp that show through her short hair when she doesn’t have it combed just right. I think this is the biggest impression Moony has ever left on me—the biggest impression life will ever leave on me. But I suppose this impression doesn’t belong to life at all.

The carpet is like burlap against the soles of my feet, but the seam at her doorway won’t permit me to pass. There are things one should do in a moment like this. Words to be spoken. Authorities to be alerted. Affairs to put in order. I know nothing about Moony’s affairs, except the scattered bits she told me—social security every month, an account somewhere with money saved for my college, paper bills that come in the mail every week and get sorted into stacks on her desk in the hall. I’m not sure anyone knows more. But as I am the only one here, I realize it falls to me to take the proper steps.