LJ Idol Week 1 - Black Rainbow
Gramma sat beside me on our screened porch, fanning, humming, working on her Celebrity Search-A-Word with a blue Bic and exclaiming when she found Fonda or Newman tucked among the gibberish letters.
It was July in Georgia and that meant hot, hot, hot all day and hot, hot, hot at night - just with mosquitos. Gramma's sun-warmed skin was sweat-sticky on mine where I curled against her but I was just five, and at five my whole world was sticky so I didn't care a bit. I just loved being near the comfort of her pillowy arms and her soft belly, her floral dresses and sparkly Avon pendants, her unconditional adoration because I was her only grand daughter, after she only had boys, boys, boys to raise when she was a mom, without wrinkles or cataracts or a daughter-in-law who resented her.
My mother was a flight attendant who worked most nights so she could be with us for dinner most days. That meant my Gramma was also mostly my mama until I was seven and stomach cancer wove its way along her tender middle and stole her from me before I got to know her as a woman, to ask her about her nights in Vaudeville, her days as my grandfather's mistress - but that's a story for another prompt.
With my mom flying all night, that meant we had to "keep real quiet" while she slept all afternoon though. It is hard for a curious kindergartner to keep anything for very long - especially quiet - so even in July, Gramma would roll her stockings down to her ankles and take me out on the porch to play when I couldn't keep still in the dim living room anymore.
The late afternoon sun was cutting across the roof and into the porch shade in discernable beams of light. Pollen and dust motes swirled in the golden rays like the tiniest of fairies. Turning towards the magical sight, the light hit my eye at an odd angle and without warning, slashed into my head like the rays were made of razors. In an instant, darkness filled the corners of my sight and little black prisms sparkled where the edges of my vision used to be. I suddenly felt very sick to my stomach.
I clutched at my Gramma and had enough time to get out the words "My head hurts," before I vomited up the peanut butter and banana contents of my belly all over the woven plastic of the porch chair.
"Pumpkin?" she asked, reaching down for me, all concern and anxious love and I remember peering at her through tears, uncomprehending, as my brain pounded like someone had kicked my forehead in.
"The light, it hurts so bad," I wept weakly and she swept me up and rushed me to my canopied bed, yanking the blinds closed as screaming sirens blared in my head. The darkness of my room was a blessing and the cool of my pillow felt like a hymn, but I still writhed in pain beneath my pink canopy, unable to escape the devil inside me.
The commotion woke my mother who came to my door to see what was the matter. When my Gramma fearfully told her what happened my mother shook her head sadly.
"Migraines. Me, my mother, every one of my sisters get them. I thought she might too - I just didn't think they'd come so soon."
In the dark, my mother sat on the bed, gently smoothing my hair back from my sweaty forehead. My heart beat a steady rhythm of agony beneath her chilly fingers.
"Don't cry, baby" she whispered. "It only makes it worse."
A great truth, but a hard lesson for a five-year-old to learn.
Thirty years later, I had to sit by my daughter's side and give her the same advice when the black prisms overtook her too.