Free The Weather by Caighlan Smith Page A

citadel bell echoing as the door beats itself back into place. There’s a little origami heart covering the top prize for a stack of cheap lotto tickets: $200, in big, bold gold, as if that were enough to keep someone comfortable for more than half a year. The heart is metallic and, on its left bump, sports the cleaved image of a milk chocolate candy bar.
    Lolly throws the heart in the garbage under the cash register, then changes the radio back to its usual station. The weather forecast’s long over.
    *   *   *
    Every patch of Granny Ma’s flesh is crusty scales, sketched by raw red skin so paper thin it’s about to break, or already has. Sometimes, on a very hot day when Granny Ma walks to the mailbox and says “But where do I enter my password?” she leaves bloody smears on the fence gate and her butterfly-print smock.
    Lolly sits behind Granny Ma in the kitchen, where she’s coaxed the elderly woman to their old spinning bar chair. Lolly is on the counter, feet braced under the stool to keep Granny Ma from spinning around. The kitchen is filled with feeble squeaking and Granny Ma’s wheezy mouth breathing.
    Lolly rubs the ointment into Granny Ma’s back. The ointment used to smell like baby powder and Vaseline but now it just smells like Granny Ma. Stray dry flakes of her stick to the cream in the bottle every time Lolly dips her hand in, so that the upper rim is crusted with bits of dead skin.
    Granny Ma is muttering something either vulgar or about a poodle. The fuzzy, neon-pink bath towel Lolly wrapped around the elderly woman fell to the floor immediately after it was situated. Sometimes Granny Ma tries to reach for it with her toes, even though it’s around a meter away. The light coming through the kitchen blinds goes straight through the tips of Granny Ma’s overgrown, chipped, and yellow toenails.
    Granny Ma starts trying to climb off the chair. “I’ve gotta see if Froggie messaged me back. I can’t make the post until Froggie lets me know.”
    Lolly stretches out her legs so far her feet hit the kitchen island, boxing in Granny Ma. “You can’t, Granny. The wifi’s down.”
    Lolly doesn’t understand what she herself is saying, just repeats what her mother’s told her to say in these situations.
    Granny Ma freezes. She starts shaking and before she can crumple to the floor, Lolly adds, “Uncle AJ’s rebooting the modem.”
    â€œOh, that’s all right then.”
    Granny Ma climbs back on the stool. Lolly begins on her flaky shoulders as the elderly woman starts talking about changing her “URL” and “annoying anons.” It’s normal, nonsensical Granny Ma talk and Lolly pays it no mind. When she’s done with the skin ointment, she hooks Granny Ma’s smock over her head and releases her. Too late Lolly realizes she put the smock on backward—not the first time she’s made this mistake—but Granny Ma’s already shuffled to her spot in the living room. She pulls out her thin metal book with the half-eaten fruit on the back and opens it sideways, immediately bashing away at the array of buttons on the last page. Granny Ma calls it her “notebook” and Lolly really doesn’t know—or care—much about it beyond that.
    After soaping her hands to near extinction, Lolly opens a tin of chickpeas and grabs a plastic fork from the kitchen drawer. On the back deck she can still hear Granny Ma’s insistent clicking through the screen door. Moths are flitting around the bug zapper, its red light showing through their wings in a way that make the wings look invisible, like the moths are just bodies. Little maggot bodies, levitating worms, ticks, gnats crawling through the air.
    A fly buzzes and Lolly smacks her neck even though the sound is closer to her brow.
    Sitting in the broken green lawn chair, next to the bug zapper, Lolly digs into her