Hazardous - Camilla Basham

She says she was in love once before PaPoo. I ask her what he was like.

"King Cake." Silence followed as if that was self-explanatory.

"King Cake?"

"Sometimes he was fresh and sweet and something inside of him would surprise you; sometimes he was just plain stale and dry and you'd choke on his damn surprises." She chuckles, removes her bottle thick glasses, spits on them, then whips them on her bathrobe and returns them to the brim of her nose.

Her crooked bony finger points to a crow outside the window sitting on the fence.
"He's ungrateful."

"The crow?"

"Plops himself down on my windowsill every evening. I threw him some Saltine crackers. He tells me the ground is nice and wet and full with plenty of worms, but thanks anyway, he'll pass." She sits in silence as if she just said something as commonplace as "Nice day out."

"The crow said that to you, Maw Maw?"

"Who do I look like, Dr. Doolittle?" she lets out a raucous opened mouth laugh.

For Maw Maw there's no distinction between life and art. She’s a crazy poet and a court jester. Like the Marx brothers or Salvador Dali, she doesn’t see the world realistically. She reflects it in continually surprising and fascinating ways.

What I'm supposed to do now is put a small plastic cup to her mouth and tell her to take her pills. Instead, I sit across from her holding the cup between us on my flat palm, like some church tea candle; the flame we both stare into.

"Do you like taking these?" I finally ask.

"No, sha, not really. They just make me feel dumber than I already am, but quieter. Dumb but quiet. It's not liked that's going to cure me, anyway. There's no cure for crazy." She lets out a laugh and pulls her rosary and an old photo of PaPoo from the torn pocket of her bathrobe. The look in her grey eyes is suddenly that of complete lucidity. “Savages, those doctors are, savages.” Her hands massage her rosary beads; her lips move in silent prayer.

"I like you just the way you are, Maw Maw. I won't tell anybody if you don't."

She raises her twisted finger to her lips, "Shhhh." Tears moisten her eyes.

I medicate the toilet bowl instead, kiss her goodnight on the forehead, soften the lights and leave her to her enchanted world.