The way Little Miss Perfect tells it, you'd think I was head of a gang of street thugs when I was a kid. We weren't thugs, we were twelve. All we wanted was some prize money, or at least a bit of ... [+]
My grandmother's mind was a bank. In the wage against age, words eroded to snow, the soft slough of rivers. Her love dove in circles of code, floating figures homed in red spaces. The wordless language of birthdays and addresses congealed, sealed, all in four flickering figures.
Her world unfurled in betting slips. Red cells fell into grids, pencil marks snared by squares. Graphite ground to shadows spread bare on pavements. The line of gamblers trailing from 7-eleven. Anchored outside, a tree where my grandmother stood. Her leaves were paper-thin, skin of betting slips. I remembered searching for the inked link between the numbers and the marks of her heart. Her branches bore plastic promises, bank notes of love's winnings. When her bets struck the luck of algorithms, the numbers materialised in stacks she pressed into my hands. A communion with paper. The heart's bark, wrapped in printed sheets, bound by figures, denominations.
I gambled on the sum of her memory. Misplaced keys, the wallet she left at the betting booth. The fading weight of her hand. Mouthed sounds, signals through sand. Moments I counted like lagging breath.
Her thoughts tongued the same numbed numbers, ghost routes she followed amidst mounting stakes. She was all-in, savings sunk into repeated numbers that bled, black beneath betting slips. Inked dreams split between reams of paper, distanced figures. Her marbled numbers stood, where time's tide corroded. At the risk of loss, embossed like numbers on paper, I betted on memory.
The singularity of her love through life's permutations.