Nala’s skateboard hits the raised lip of an uneven sidewalk that catapults her forward. She raises her arms and spreads her hands open. Her head tells her to do that because scraped, bleeding hands, or possible broken or fractured wrists protect her brain from a concussion or worse.

         Grandma slips on something liquid Nala’s dad spilled when working on his Mustang. Even though she holds onto her walker, she goes down, both legs kicking skyward like a soccer coach demonstrating an advanced technique. Her forest green corduroys blur, reminding me of the undulating waves of an Aurora Borealis. She lands on her tailbone, the term misleading, as four melded bones form the coccyx.

         Tonight, they both sit on the loveseat in the living room watching TV. When Grandma asks to see Nala’s hands, my sister takes the old woman’s hands in hers.

         “Which hands feel older?” Nala asks.

      “All four feel soft and warm as they did on our birth days,” Grandma says, then squeezes Nala’s hands. My big sister smiles as though given gloves on a winter day.

They agree on watching Wheel of Fortune.

“Too bad Bob Barker died,” Grandma says, one hand picking out kernel after kernel of caramel popcorn served in a Rubber Maid bowl I brought them.

“He’s The Price Is Right,” Nala corrects and pictures the watercolor painting she finished this morning. Her boyfriend Ted sent a photograph from Guatemala where he is helping the indigenous population upgrade their bathrooms. Beyond the foregrounded, newly installed shower, through an open window, spreads a checkerboard hillscape swathed in greens: castleton, emerald, sage, kelly. The landscape mimics the quilt Grandma gave Nala on her fourteenth birthday, each square a different color and style of witch’s hat. Nala was old enough to know how important it is to lie to loved ones. She gushed over the gift. After Grandma left that day, Nala zipped it inside her suitcase and wrote a note to herself to spread it on her bed whenever her grandmother visited.

         “I have something to show you,” Nala tells Grandma. In her bedroom, before Nala takes her art off the easel, she sits on her bed and looks it over for flaws. She’s old enough to understand the political thrust of her work, the tragic irony. Although prouder of this painting than any earlier work, she hesitates to show it off, reluctant to receive the expected and deserved praise her grandmother, also an artist, will give her.

         Nala looks down at her hands, still gross, rough and raw as scaly salmon. She knows from junior year biology the change of carotenoid pigments occurs naturally, the rush to spawn irrefutable, unrelenting.

         Looking up, she notices the quilt spread out on her bed behind her painting and says she is going to give her skateboard she no longer needs to me, her little brother.

“You sure?” I say.

“Take this down and show Grandma.” She takes her painting off its easel.

Downstairs, I hold up the painting next to Vanna White and watch Grandma turn her head from the TV to the artwork.

“I need to see it closer,” the old woman says.

I hold the painting in front of me like a shield and advance toward her.

“Stop.”

She ogles it like a county fair judge hovering over a slice of peach pie before digging in. Her head rotates as she takes in the canvas as though watching a second hand circle the clock’s face.

“Bring Nala here.”

I lean the painting against the coffee table.

“Before you leave, turn it away from me.”

I do what I’m told because each Christmas she gives me a hundred dollar bill in a wrinkled envelope she asks my mother to hide in the Christmas tree so I have to reach in and retrieve it while getting pricked by fir needles, Grandma’s way, she explained the first time, that it takes courage and pain to get what you want.

“She wants to see you,” I tell Nala, who is lying on her bed reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, her summer reading book for senior year. “I’m not sure she likes it.”

“She’s not supposed to,” Nala says. “I am.”

I watch from the stairs as Nala walks in and sits down next to Grandma. She folds her arms and watches Pat Sajak. Grandma twists her body as much as she can toward Nala.

“You see,” she says.

Nala stays still, stays silent.

“You see so much more than I did at your age.”

Nala swivels her head to look at Grandma.

“Thanks,” she says. “I think.”

“It’s not a compliment. It’s a warning.”

Warning for what? I want to know.

“Is it good?” Nala asks like she has been tortured.

“Oh, honey,” Grandma pats Nala’s knee, “your sight is a gift. I only hope you can bear what you see. Using a canvas to paint what comes to you is the way to enfold what you have been given.”

“What about the witches?”

Grandma turns back to the TV where a contestant has just solved the phrase, “COME HELL OR HIGH WATER.” “You know better than I,” she says. “You see them through the window, populating the land as part of the land, as both inseparable and distinct. Now….”

Grandma leans forward, grabs the remote control, and clicks off the TV.

“I’m chilly and I want to take a nap. Run up and bring me the quilt I sewed for you.”

Nala stares at the blank TV screen, then turns and kisses Grandma on the cheek before getting up and running past me up the stairs.

“You’re next to get a quilt, young man,” Grandma calls to me from the couch, still facing forward, as if she has eyes in the back of her head.

Richard Holinger’s work has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, Hobart, Chautauqua, and elsewhere. He is a four-time Pushcart Prize and two-time Best of the Net nominee; Best American Essays 2018 recognized his Thread essay as “Notable.” Books include North of Crivitz (poetry) and Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences (essays). He earned a doctorate in Creative Writing from UIC, and lives northwest of Chicago where fox, deer, herons, eagles, and other miracles cross his path.