Hard as a Rock

New Prose Poem

Hello! Welcome to MUMU Stories! My name is Marianne Manzler. I’m a writer, educator, editor, and arts administrator, and this podcast explores the unique shapes that stories take. Thanks for being here.

This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

We gathered at my grandfather’s house after his funeral,
where I overheard my ninety-year-old great-grandmother lament:
it should have been me. It should have been me.
She sat in the parlor room, next to the kitchen, where he kept the jujubes in a glass bowl,
a rainbow of candies hard as a rock. Even then, I knew no mother
should have to watch her child die.
Once upon a time, my grandfather went to bed and never woke up.
I was ten years old in 2000; my brother only five.
I sat between my mother and father in the front row—my brother too young to attend—
my parents newly divorced. I wore a black velvet dress and itchy white stockings,
my dark-brown hair a shell of armor on my head, dusting my neck.

We buried him in the green valley behind the church,
where he is surrounded by the remains of the nineteenth century, washed-out tombstone faces,
blank canvases, their identities vanished:
the ghost of an outstretched hand, a blooming flower, a weeping willow.
What other relics do we hold within?
Before he died, I asked him: can we invite my stepfather to Christmas next year?
He said, maybe next year, kiddo. Next year never came.

We came to this same church for Sunday school,
where I crushed animal crackers in my hands and drank orange juice from papery cups
in the Armstrong basement and distracted angelic students
from their depictions of thousand-year-old stories.
I waited for the part that came after service,
when we left the stuffy biblical hall and went home to make brunch together,
scrambling eggs over a gas stove. Too short, I stood on a stool to reach the pan.
He held my elbow to steady me, reminded me to slowly mix the runny yellow mess.

Twenty-five years later, when my grandmother, his first wife, was cremated,
her three kids each grabbed a handful of her to release onto the plot of land
and gravestone that she prepaid, all we had to do was inscribe the date,
my father told me. This part was simple.
Before she died, as her memory slipped away, she complained of a toothache
and asked me again what else she swallowed.