By Christopher Sloce

Granma lowers me into the basement on her dumbwaiter when she puts me in reflection time. I think about getting old sheets and straw so when she puts me down below for reflection I am at least comfortable when I fall asleep, at least as comfortable as I can be with all the rats crawling in the walls all around me and me reflecting on what got me here. Here I lay, looking into the laundry room till morning when she pulls the dumbwaiter back up.

There are rags and food boxes down here and they’ve been chewed up by little tiny mice, maybe when the big rats in the walls don’t eat them. I saw one in a crack once, large as a shoebox and its red eyes looking in my eyes. I screamed and Granma just stood above and stared saying What? What do you need me for?

Granma has walked away, I have heard the door close. She is going to bed. I can hear her walking up the stairs of the creaky house we live in, full of big rats and tiny mice and Granma and me.

When Mama died, Granma was there. She had to bury Mother. The funeral was hard to plan. Usually Mama didn’t bring me back here. We lived in the city. I would ask Mama if we could visit. And she’d say, “I like the city. I only go there when I have to.” She drowned in a bathtub. I asked all the people who helped when I found her how could Mama die in such little water. All the people said she did because sometimes people drown. One man said actually it does not take that much water to drown someone.

Mother is the dead body. Beforehand she was Mama. I loved her. I’ve wondered if I could drown in a bath, too. Granma puts the water high. If there’s not enough, you won’t get clean, she says.

She works me cleaning. I scrub, vacuum and dust. Her house is dusty, and there is always something to dust. I can never figure out if I’m done because it’s so dusty. She has her snacks during the day– Granma is always eating but never big somehow, she says it’s the worm she has– and I have to clean up what’s left over. She puts all the trash she wants thrown away on the counter, the cans of fish and cracker sleeves and chip bags and burger boxes. She lies in her living room bed, with no blanket on because she claims it will make her sick, and she reads books without covers. After the house looks to her standard, she lets me play. Though now, she has said, because of the games I like to play, she won’t let me.

One day, I went to the creek down the hill. There was a boy there at the creek. He was sitting on the dirt and he watched me while I walked down. I was actually thinking about grabbing the little fishes and lobsters and frogs in the creek I saw, maybe to run them back up the house and put them in the smudged fish bowl I found in Mama’s old room. He patted on the ground and had me sit next to him. He told me his name and I’m trying to forget it because Granma told me to but his name, Heckle, I keep hearing it in my head. He said he came down here because he loved to look up at the hill. He pointed up. Don’t you see all the colors on the hill? I sat with him and looking up, he pointed at the grey house, and then the brown trees, and then the yellow grass.

He saw all these things, and it was like the first time I saw it. Heckle was maybe a little older than me but all the ways he could see stuff I couldn’t at first, it was like he was ancient. And when Heckle looked at me, it was like he could see in me all these wonderful things. The sun would set and I watched with him, squatting on my feet so I wouldn’t dirty up the back of my jeans. And when I got done, each time, I crossed over the creek and Heckle said, “Bye. See you tomorrow,” like he knew each time I’d come back. He had me pegged, because I was going to, if only to get looked at like I was something new.

At night in my bedroom I’d think about all the things we talked about that day, and when I thought about them, I realized I was starting to think about something else. His eyes, how soft and brown they were, like a chipmunk, and how they could see something inside me nobody else had looked at. I never thought of eyes like that. I thought of them more than I would most things, and I thought of how he could touch me with looks, his eyes like a keyring holding all the keys. It would keep me up all night, thrashing around, rolling over, trying to figure out what to do with myself.

Granma started noticing me slacking, being lazy with my chores. And spending time playing outside, too. But I realized she wanted me out of the house for some reason more than she wanted me there, so I had plenty of time when I was by myself. She’d complain about the chores, how I couldn’t do anything the way she wanted me to, but then when I fixed them, she’d tell me she was going to lay back down in the living room to read her paperbacks, and I could do whatever it is I was going to do outside. That’s when I went to go see Heckle.

I could feel all the warmth radiating off him as he sat and told me all the things he saw in that hill. Sometimes there were wonderful things he saw, other times he saw terrible ones. And I ate up every single thing he said, listening to his voice purr. He’d tell me I look nice, sometimes, which I knew I didn’t. Granma didn’t really care much for clothes, so none of mine were fancy.

The last time I knew I’d ever see him was when we went to the trees. He was sitting on the bank and said he was told by everybody something we could do. People kept asking him when he was going to do this, and he said he didn’t have a good answer, but that he thought maybe people had asked me, and that we could just get it over with for me? What is it? I asked him. I’ll show you, he said.

He took me to the trees. I crawled out later not sure of myself or him or if there was any reason to talk to him again. We weren’t really sure what to say to each other, but it was getting dark. I went back up the hill. Before I went we stood, looking at each other across the creek. He didn’t say bye.

I ate chicken noodle soup quiet with Granma. She didn’t really have much to say while we sat there. I told her it was good and she said thank you. I asked if I could go upstairs and take a bath. She said she’d come up and draw the water up with me. She always did but I thought I would be okay if I did this one time. She thought otherwise.

Granma stood over me. I stood there, not wanting to take off my clothes. Get undressed, Granma said. I asked if she could wait. She said no. She couldn’t. So I did. I got down to everything but my underwear. She told me to drop it and get in the tub. I said why. Get in the tub, she said. I don’t understand, Granma.

She grabbed me by the hair and pushed me in. She took a washcloth and she shoved it over my mouth. She held down my neck with one hand and turned the spigot with another. Water went down my throat, filling it up. I thrashed.

You went somewhere. She said.

She stopped. I told her: I went in the trees with a friend.

Granma gave me a towel. Come with me to your bedroom, she said.

We went to the bedroom. It was Mama’s old bedroom. Not anymore. She was Mother, dead, so it was mine. Granma opened the top drawer of my chest of drawers. She pulled out an odd screwdriver. It seemed to cork a little like a pig’s tail. I had never seen a screwdriver like that before in my life.

You lay down. I did.

She stood over me with the screwdriver and ran it down to my belly-button. You’re just like your mom. She said. You both have a secret, and I’m the only one that knows it.

I tried not to cry. What is it?

She put the screwdriver into my bellybutton. She cranked it. I felt like there was something inside me that was turning, something I didn’t even knew I had. I started to sweat, tears started running down my face. A salty spot grew on the mattress with each time Granma cranked. I was trying not to look at what was going on. I opened up my eyes and saw.

I tried to push her away with my arm, but when it did, my arm came off. It laid there on the bed, connected to my body with a thin red wire. My other arm couldn’t push her away, either. It was about to fall off. Granma pulled one of my legs away. I kept watching the wire get thin. She pulled it back and it smacked against the bed. She pulled my head off of my neck, pulled it far away. When I looked down, I could tell where most people had bones, I just had wires that kept me together, all held together by the special screw in my belly button. I would have bit her. But I couldn’t. If she kept going I was going to just be a bunch of doll parts.

I’m the only one with this screwdriver. I can do this to you anytime. She said. Any time you act up, I can come in here and unscrew all of your parts. I did it to your mom, and I’ll do it to you, too. She said it, chicken noodle soup breathed. If you think you can just go around and act like that.

No. I cried.

She took the screwdriver and began tightening me, turning it right. My limbs drew back up into me, and finally I was whole again. She looked at me. This is why we behave.

I nodded because I was happy I could.

You need to think about why I had to do that, she said. I’m going to take you somewhere else so you’ll know to think.

That was my first night on the dumbwaiter. And that’s when she did what she does every night she drops me down there. She puts me on the dumbwaiter, and then, she puts the screwdriver into my belly. She loosens me up, then she pushes me down. She says she can’t trust me not to climb up. In the morning, she tightens me up so I can do her chores.

For now I am down here among the rats and the boxes. Granma is upstairs. I can hear her rattling around, doing things with so much noise. She has asked me to reflect on what put me down here. And the only answer I have is one she doesn’t want to hear. Granma doesn’t want to hear love is why she sends me downstairs on the dumbwaiter.

Biographical Statement: I was born in Wise County, Virginia, near the Tennessee and Kentucky border, early 90s, and was raised by my mother and grandparents in a country coal-mining family that kept a high priority on reading, whether it was the Bible or Louis L’Amour. Considerably less Focus on the Family approved were my uncle’s Stephen King short story collections. It was there I encountered somebody who tried to write about blue collar life in books like Skeleton Crew and Night Shift. It was also the earliest parts of his Dark Tower series, specifically The Gunslinger, that were my first introduction to “The Weird”, as we might call it. As I grew older and followed his own literary pathways, I learned about people like John D. MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, and Dashell Hammett, who took pulp seriously. I also began to read Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy.

I left Wise (besides a year to work after college) to go to school and eventually work in Richmond. At VCU, I studied modernist authors like Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka. Later in life I began a more systematic study of “The Weird” featuring lights such as Thomas Ligotti and Robert Aickman as well as expanding my literary horizons to include people like James Baldwin, Anna Kavan, Jean Rhys, VS Naipaul, and so on. Richmond was also where I began getting involved in anti-capitalist and labor politics, leading to my interest in proudly subaltern publishing paths such as zine-making and the thirst to understand history. My social engagement and own personal proclivities are what lead me today to becoming a librarian at Richmond Public Library’s Main branch, where my special focus is archiving our collection of zines.

I live with my partner. If you can believe it, I own a cat.


Artist’s Statement: “Granma’s Dumbwaiter” began as a dramatic monologue titled “The Pull-Apart Grandma” in a triptych play I wrote called The Valentines: Three Plays About Love. It began as an experiment to write a story that worked as a pure distillation of facts about what happens: there is the narrator, the Granma, the narrator’s “friend” Heckle, and the dead mother. The narrator, named VOICE in the play, was designed to be played by whoever best fit with their dramatic talents: it was to be essentially genderless, equally playable by male, female, or non-binary voices, with androgynous costuming.

The play sat languishing on my Google Drive for around seven years. I changed my focus from scriptwriting to prose, with the eventual plan to convert any lingering plays or scripts into short stories, novellas, or novels. “Granma” was first. The goal was to see how dramatically satisfying a story could be while removing as much concrete information as possible, to leave only the thin bone of the story with enough scraps of meat that one could reasonably surmise what animal it came from.

With so many facts left unstated, there will be various different readings of the story. I will allow one point to be clarified: the lack of gendering our narrator is not a bullheaded escape from gender and sex based readings. If anything, it is the narrator’s obfuscation of their gender and sex that opens up an entire universe of questions, the key one being of the narrator’s identity. Who are they sitting on that dumbwaiter, sleeping, waiting for Granma to pull them back upstairs for another day of abuse, and when will they get to live their true identity?