𝐁𝐎𝐘𝐈𝐒𝐇// 𝐄𝐃𝐃𝐈𝐄 𝐌𝐔𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐗𝐎𝐂

𝐯𝐢𝐢. ✭ 𝐆𝐎𝐋𝐃 𝐃𝐈𝐆𝐆𝐄𝐑

JUNE, 1979; CHANCE

"And he's dead. 'Bout fuckin' time." Standing up from the hospital room's armchair, Grandma walked lazily over to Ben. A smoldering cigarette dangled from her lips. This sound of his life monitor flat-lined. One long beep sounded his departure. All that was left of the ancient man was his wrinkled corpse. "Stupid fuck." Scorned Grandma, frowning down at his lifeless body. "I told him to stop eating all that McDonalds. Fucking McDonald's, that's what'll do it to you. What rich guy eats fucking McDonald's?"

"I guess he did." I breathed, a tear rolling down my face. My body felt heavy, weighed down like Atlas holding the world. I had just witnessed my first person dying. I had seen death firsthand. I had watched the life flicker from the elderly man's eyes. They looked peaceful before dying, glistening before falling dull.

Grandma had been married to Ben for five years. Most of the time they were married he was sick, always up in his room, sitting ill in his rocking chair. They had gotten married in Vegas, eloping on a whim after Grandma had sauced him up.

Ben wasn't the most pleasant old man. Mostly he was grumpy and reclusive but that wasn't something that concerned Grandma. She had her mind on something else.

"Why are you crying, Baby?" Grandma asked, sitting on the edges of Ben's hospital bed. "Come here. Come here." She waved me over to wrap me into her open arms. "Chancie, this is a good thing." Her fingers thumbed away the sniffle tears I emitted. "A celebration even. Fucking mazel tov!"

"Why?" My bottom lip quivered as my eyes fell on Ben's old body. The body he used to habituate.

I imagined his body decomposing, wondering how quickly everything would happen. Was it true that he'd shit himself? Would he have explosive diarrhea at this very moment? Would he explode like how whales did after they died?

Or would he lay on the hospital bed, each part of him slowly rotting away until he was nothing but a skeleton of bones? How could he just die like that? Where did he go? Was heaven real? Would he even go to heaven it was? He was kind of a nasty old man in his final years, never that kind.

"Chancie, Grandma's gonna tell you something  right now." She flipped up her aviator sunglasses, propping them on the top of her head. "Women. Pretty women. Girls like you and me, work smarter not harder. We make the assholes we get married to do all the shit we don't wanna do. They bring in the money and we get to use it. We never have to work a day in our lives if we're smart enough. I have been smart enough."

"So you used him? For money?" Wracking my brain, I tried to think of reasons why Grandma wouldn't do such a thing. I tried in vain to prove to myself how good she was. She wouldn't. She couldn't. She did.

"Hell yeah, I did, and do you know why?"

"Why?"

"He used me just as much as I used him. That's a relationship, Chancie. Even the ones that are about love and fairytales and glitter. All that shit is just a cover-up for the truth." Her cigarette had found its end. Grandma flicked it out of her mouth and extinguished it against Ben's bedside table.
"It's all a game. A give and take kind of thing, Kid. Men, like this shitbird right here, see ladies as trophies and shiny toys. They show us off to their friends and then put us back on the shelf to hide away. I use that to my advantage and I trick 'em. I use the system to get what I want."