The Left Party
by Kate Simmons
Nana Nazareth was only four feet seven inches when she hailed from Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Old age and cancer shrunk her by two more and then death took off a third one. The child's casket we got was too light for the pallbearers' hands on the icy steps of St Bart's. My uncles shuffled atop the frozen patches salted by the priest earlier that afternoon, but that casket blew away from them and slid down all sixty seven stairs and my grandmother's dwarf body flew out and sailed across the street right through the green door of the medical dispensary. We were all smoking and I was reading The Color Purple and my dead grandmother's mouth said Put that colored lesbian book away. But Oprah, I thought and tried to say OPRAH but nothing came out. Matthew offered my grandmother's detached head a hit and I watched in amazement as she sucked a perfectly huge ball of smoke up the glass pipe, inhaled it pro-like before she coughed her dentures out. When you cough that means you will get really stoned, Matthew informed us. My grandmother's waxed lips parted, she winked and said, Read Past Imperfect by Joan Collins. This is the book everyone needs to have in bed with them, not that feminist filth. Then she lit a cigarette and I watched the wart on her eyelid jump as she talked and I thought too bad the undertaker did not remove that wart when she was getting embalmed at which point Nana said, If you ever go to Russia, take a suitcase full of American cigarettes with you. When you go out to dinner you simply place one on your plate and the waiter will come for it and you'll experience first class service. I smoke one pack of Kools and one pack of Merits a day and some days I eat nothing at all but dark chocolate liqueurs and... Her wart lid blinked and Doctor Zhivago came on the television. I love Omar Sharif, she exhaled. Bad luck his feeble red heart. Then, by the way, thank you darling, she said to me, I look damn good for being gone. The mortician didn't part my hair on the wrong side like he did your Uncle Mark's. Do you remember darling? Jane had to borrow my comb to right part it before the wake.
