Zombie Lolita: (A Collection of Short Stories) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

***

Dacha meets her grandmother in the living room and they head to the garage. They circumvent a pile of boxes Grandma keeps saying she’s going to label, and walk to a closet next to her grandfather’s old workbench. The closet is filled with tools, some rusty others in near mint condition, and smells like a strange mixture of metal and flowers. Hanging from a nail, with their stems tied together by a string, is a large bunch of red and white roses.

The roses are wilted, their petals the consistency of wax paper. Grandma removes the bunch and hands it to Dacha. She reaches into a cabinet painted the same color white as the swing on their back porch, and retrieves a few paper bags with words written on their folds in permanent marker: lavender, sandalwood, clary sage, orris root, clove, dried lemon peels. She shows Dacha the bag of clary sage.

‘Did I ever tell you about clary sage?’

‘No,’ Dacha says.

‘They used to use it to get things out of people’s eyes.’

‘How?’

‘The seeds have a coating kind of like mucus,’ her grandmother says as she closes the closet door.

‘Snot?’

‘Yes, kind of like snot. Well, people would get things stuck in their eyes and they would use a clary sage seed to get it out by sticking the seed right in their eye. It would produce mucus once it mixed with the goo that’s already in your eye, and it would be easier for them to get out. Nifty, huh?’

They enter the kitchen, past the photo of Dacha’s mother and father on their wedding day, past the photo of her grandmother and her grandfather with her uncle, past the photo of Grandma’s dog, Sparky, who died a year ago, past grandfather’s keys which have never left a little ceramic ashtray from Arizona, and past Dacha’s biology textbook.

The Attar of Roses sits in the middle of the table, waiting to be opened.

Grandma gets a big wooden bowl from the pantry along with a wooden mixing spoon and a measuring cup while Dacha separates roses from their stems, using a knife to clip the little white base at the end of each of the petals. Grandma sits down and begins measuring out four cups of sandalwood.

‘I love the smell of sandalwood’, she says. ‘Buddhists believe it helps you see through desire when you meditate. They carve all sorts of statues and religious items out of it over in Asia. Oh, I sure would like to go to Asia you know, but I don’t think it’s happening this lifetime.’

‘We should go together,’ Dacha says.

‘Where would we go?’

‘Maybe Tokyo? I told you about Yuka, the Japanese exchange student in my biology class. She showed us all these pictures of the Cherry Blossoms there.’

‘Japan? Too crowded,’ Grandma says, waving away the suggestion.

‘It would be like New York, not so bad.’

‘I think I’ll just stay here. These old bones don’t like big crowds.’

Grandma begins to hum as she measures out the clove, the lavender, the lemon peels, and the orris root.

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