The End Is Nigh

The smell was worse when Nayima leaned over Gram to inject her crushed pill. Nayima’s throat locked. How would she clean her and scrape away Gram’s dead skin later if she could barely stand the smell now?

Gram’s eyes were flickering again, ready to close.

“Are you hungry?” Nayima asked.

Gram’s lips moved, but she didn’t say anything Nayima could hear.

Nayima didn’t smell feces, so she would postpone the rest—the changing of the urine-soiled bed pad, the gentle sponge cleaning, the bedsores, the feeding. All of that would wait until they had moved to Mr. Yamamoto’s flea-free home.

He always had been meticulous, Mr. Yamamoto. Even his roses were still on schedule.

“I love you, Gram,” Nayima said, and kissed her grandmother’s forehead. She allowed her lips to linger against the warm, paper-thin skin across the crown of Gram’s skull.

Gram’s breath whistled through her nose. She whistled more now, since the smoke.

Luckily, the cancer wasn’t in Gram’s lungs, so breathing had never been a problem. But breathing would be a problem for both of them soon. It hadn’t occurred to Nayima to ask Shanice for oxygen, not back then. She hadn’t known the fires were coming. Even the dust masks Nayima wore outside had just been in a box left untouched for years in Gram’s garage. She wore them until they fell apart; she only had twenty-two more.

When Nayima fitted a new dust mask across her grandmother’s nose and mouth, Gram didn’t even open her eyes.

The first scream didn’t come until they were well beyond the front door, when Nayima had lulled herself into thinking that the move might not be so bad. One of the wheels wandered off the edge of the driveway, rattling Gram’s bed. Her scream was strong and hearty.

“Sorry,” Nayima whispered, her mantra. “I’m sorry, Gram.”

Gram’s eyes, closed before, were wide and angry. She glared at Nayima, then turned her gaze to the sky. Even with pain lining her face, Nayima saw Gram’s bewilderment.

“It’s smoke,” she said. “Brushfires.”

The bewilderment melted away, leaving only the pain. Most of Nayima’s life with Gram, there had been wildfires every other summer. They both had grown accustomed to the sirens and beating helicopters that were still Nayima’s daily and nightly music. She heard a far-off helicopter now, and a choppy, angry voice from an indistinct loudspeaker. She braced for popping gunshots, but there were none. Not this time.

“Mr. Yamamoto took a trip with his grandchildren, so he said we could use his house,” Nayima said, trying to distract Gram, but a bump elicited a shriek. “I’m sorry, Gram. I’m sorry.”

At the edge of the driveway, it occurred to Nayima that she could pull the car out of the garage instead. She’d packed the passenger side and trunk solid, but she’d left the back seat empty for Gram, layered with blankets. She could wash, dress and feed Gram right outside and then carry her into the car. Would the screams be any worse? What difference would it make if Gram was screaming in Foothill Park or screaming somewhere down the smoky interstate?

Nayima’s tears stung in the smoke. She had to stop to wipe her eyes dry with a section of her thin shirt. When she looked at her clothing, she realized she was only wearing a black tank top and underwear, the clothes she slept in. And white socks. She had so much laundry to do.

Gram’s shriek melted to a childlike, hopeless sob.

Nayima gave Gram’s hand another squeeze and then carefully, very carefully, pushed the rolling bed across the bumpy asphalt, toward the beckoning yellow rose blossoms.

“Look, Gram,” she said. “Mr. Yamamoto’s roses are blooming.”

Gram coughed a phlegmy cough behind her dusk mask. And screamed in pain again.

Gram was crying by the time Nayima finally brought the bed to rest in its new home beside Mr. Yamamoto’s black sofa and artificial palm tree.

Nayima cursed herself. Why hadn’t she found a way to kill the fleas at Gram’s house instead? What had possessed her? A fierce headache hammered Nayima’s temples, bringing paralyzing hopelessness as bad as she’d felt since the 72-hour flu took over the news.

So they were both crying while Nayima pulled Gram’s bandages away to reveal the black and red angry stink of her wounds, the yawning decay that cratered her back. Nayima could nestle a golf ball in the cavern that grew above her grandmother’s right buttock. Infection had found the sores despite Nayima’s steady cleanings.

“Fuck,” she said. “Fuck.”

Her hands were shaking as she debrided the wound in a clumsy imitation of what Shanice had tried to teach her—the cruel, steady scraping of Gram’s most tender flesh.

And, of course, Gram screamed the whole while.

But Nayima carried on despite the lump clogging her throat, despite her smoke-stinging eyes. Then the infected flesh began to disappear, the smell turned more sterile, the ointments began their healing, the bandages sealed the mess from sight.

And Gram stopped screaming. Stopped whimpering. Only moaned here and there to signal she needed a moment to rest, and Nayima let her rest whenever she could.

Nayima retrieved her jug of boiled water, dipped her sponge in it, and gently washed Gram between her legs, water ru

Then it was time to feed her, so Nayima checked beneath the surgical tape that affixed Gram’s gastric tube near her navel. No infection there either, nothing out of place. Then she filled a bag with Ensure, hung it from the waiting hook on the bed, and watched the tube fill with nourishment as it crawled toward Gram’s stomach.

By then, Gram was already sleeping, as if the day had never happened.

The smoke seemed to clear from the air.

“Thank you, God,” Nayima said.

Mr. Yamamoto had ru

And no fleas. Mr. Yamamoto’s house was a vacation.

Nayima checked on Gram regularly, turning her every two hours. She moved her car to Mr. Yamamoto’s pristine garage, which looters had overlooked. She even found a flashlight and an empty gas can, which she squeezed into her trunk. She turned and fed Gram again.

The sky was dark long before sunset.

The coyotes were fooled by the dark skies and the sirens. Just before five o’clock, a coyote chorus rose, sharp through the house’s walls. There were more coyotes all the time. Maybe some left-behind dogs had joined the coyotes, howling their grief. They sang all around her, as if Foothill Park were ringed by wilderness.

Nayima decided she wasn’t afraid. Not yet. Maybe one day. Maybe tomorrow.

She sat on the front porch of Mr. Yamamoto’s house with a warm beer, her only indulgence, one of her last six in an eighteen-pack she’d found in a neighbor’s rec room. She’d rather have weed, but it still helped her forget what needed forgetting. A little. For a time. Nayima stared back at Gram’s narrow two-story townhouse across the street. Their jacaranda tree had showered the driveway with purple buds. Would her tree survive the fires? Would she come back and find beauty in the ruins to show her children one day?

She was ready to go back inside when a siren squawked close by, and a police cruiser coasted in front of her, so mud-caked she could barely see its black and white paint. U

The man who climbed out of the car was stocky, not much taller than she was, with sun-browned skin and dark hair. She was glad when she saw his town police uniform, which seemed friendlier than a soldier’s. He looked about her age, as young as twenty-one. She had seen him before, perhaps during the evacuation. Like most cops, he wasn’t smiling.