As her hair thinned, so did her skull, and they started to keep her out of the direct sun, for fear of her memories evaporating in the afternoon heat. A hat was chosen, several actually, but only one made her feel comfortable, a medium brimmed woven number with a brown velvet tie, one that her granddaughter had purchased for her own self when she realized she was getting to the age when she, really, for real this time, needed to shield her own skin from the sun.
The hat was the only thing that coaxed the grandmother to leave the house, due to her hair, due to her translucent skull. And so that is the hat she wore in the daylight, in public, and sometimes even in the house, because the kitchen lights would also prick at the grandmother’s brain, make her forget the name of her dog who died five years ago, and what year exactly she’d come out to California, and why she liked that particular shade of lipstick.
But light could always find a way through the tiny weaves of the hat or layers of scarves, or the wig the grandmother wore one afternoon just for fun, after finding it in a forgotten costume box in the back of a closet, which the grandmother had mistaken for her own bedroom, and had taken a nap among the photo albums and winter coats.
The more crystalline the glass of her skull became, the more it sharpened the light, and the more the light sculpted the grandmother away, sanding down the brain until it was smoothed over and hardened, until its brainpink color drained to a dull umber, which almost matched the exact shade of the grandmother’s long-gone hair when she was twenty-two and then again at twenty-seven with some blonde years in between.
Near the end, the grandmother sat openly in the sun without the hat, because at this point she no longer cared very much about hats or anything at all except the feeling that came with warming herself. The granddaughter called this her lizard phase, but the grandmother no longer knew what lizards were and so only chuckled because everyone else did. The tiniest leftover voice deep within the glass of her brain wondered if maybe that’s what she was, a lizard, if that was the name for the thing she had forgotten. But the question echoed through the caverns of the dwindling glaze of her mind and received no answer.
At the highest point of daylight, the grandmother seemed to radiate like a lamppost or a tiki torch, her skull now just a mirror bursting its reflections to every corner of the yard, temporarily blinding a neighbor who happened to peek through a knot in the fence. The granddaughter tried to get her to wear the hat again for safety reasons, but the grandmother threw it into the bushes or into the kitchen sink at the soonest convenience.
While the daylight became dangerous, night offered some consolation. Beneath the moon and a smattering of stars, the grandmother’s skull was peaceful, rippling like water under the evening’s darkness. The granddaughter saw herself reflected in the glass that was once the bonehome where her grandmother’s essence had lived. She searched her own eyes for a sign that her own self lived somewhere in her own skull; a little someone who looked like her waving from a pupil window would, perhaps, give her some relief. Maybe the grandmother, too, was still inside herself, but surrounded by such thick walls and sharp things that she could not be heard.
The granddaughter stared for some time, until the grandmother fell asleep in the chair in the moonlight, and the granddaughter picked her up and brought her to bed. Though her head had grown heavy with change, the rest of her body had slipped into weightlessness, as if filled with light.
The skull glowed on its own the night the grandmother died. Even months after the funeral, the granddaughter could still see the glow leaking out through the earth where the grandmother was buried. An odd fear crept up in her as she caught the light in her palm, a tingling unsettle like a limb that had fallen asleep and was just now waking up.
She stopped visiting the grave but requested to be notified immediately if the glow faded away.
She could not get herself to wear the hat again, the one that had been intended for her all along, but instead let it hang by the front door where it emanated just enough light to guide her toward the kitchen in the late hours, when something stirred her awake, when something felt like it was leaking out of her ears, and she could not remember why she’d wandered away from her bed in the first place.
And when the call came, years later, that the glow had finally dissolved, the granddaughter thanked them and hung up the phone, and the tiny voice deep down in the caverns of her own self wondered who was buried in that grave. They seemed to think she knew, and she hoped she hadn’t forgotten, though her hair was thinning recently and the sun was pricklier than usual so it was hard to keep track of things. Maybe she should send flowers, maybe something the color of burnt sage, or cinnamon swirling into hot coffee, like her grandmother used to make, so she thinks, so she tries to remember.
