few simple rituals of Gramma’s death perfectly. He would cover her face and then—his face lit at the symbolism of this—he would put away her unused tea bag and her unused cup. Yes.
He went in, each step a conscious act. Gramma’s room was dark, her body a vague hump in the bed, and he fumbled madly for the light switch, not finding it for what seemed to be an eternity. At last it clicked up, flooding the room with low yellow light from the cut-glass fixture overhead.
Gramma lay there, hand dangling, mouth open. George regarded her, dimly aware that little pearls of sweat now clung to his forehead, and wondered if his responsibility in the matter could possibly extend to picking up that cooling hand and putting it back in bed with the rest of Gramma. He decided it did not. Her hand could have fallen out of bed any old time. That was too much. He couldn’t touch her. Everything else, but not that.
Slowly, as if moving through some thick fluid instead of air, George approached Gramma. He stood over her, looking down. Gramma was yellow. Part of it was the light, filtered through the old fixture, but not all.
Breathing through his mouth, his breath rasping audibly, George grasped the coverlet and pulled it up over Gramma’s face. He let go of it and it slipped just a little, revealing her hairline and the yellow creased parchment of her brow. Steeling himself, he grasped it again, keeping his hands far to one side and the other of her head so he wouldn’t have to touch her, even through the cloth, and pulled it up again. This time it stayed. It was satisfactory. Some of the fear went out of George. He had buried her. Yes, that was why you covered the dead person up, and why it was right: it was like burying them. It was a statement.
He looked at the hand dangling down, unburied, and discovered now that he could touch it, he could tuck it under and bury it with the rest of Gramma.
He bent, grasped the cool hand, and lifted it.
The hand twisted in his and clutched his wrist.
George screamed. He staggered backward, screaming in the empty house, screaming against the sound of the wind reaving the eaves, screaming against the sound of the house’s creaking joints. He backed away, pulling Gramma’s body askew under the coverlet, and the hand thudded back down, twisting, turning, snatching at the air ... and then relaxing to limpness again.
I’m all right, it was nothing, it was nothing but a reflex.
George nodded in perfect understanding, and then he remembered again how her hand had turned, clutching his, and he shrieked. His eyes bulged in their sockets. His hair stood out, perfectly on end, in a cone. His heart was a runaway stamping-press in his chest. The world tilted crazily, came back to the level, and then just went on moving until it was tilted the other way. Every time rational thought started to come back, panic goosed him again. He whirled, wanting only to get out of the room to some other room—or even three or four miles down the road, if that was what it took—where he could get all of this under control. So he whirled and ran full tilt into the wall, missing the open doorway by a good two feet.
He rebounded and fell to the floor, his head singing with a sharp, cutting pain that sliced keenly through the panic. He touched his nose and his hand came back bloody. Fresh drops spotted his shirt. He scrambled to his feet and looked around wildly.
The hand dangled against the floor as it had before, but Gramma’s body was not askew; it also was as it had been.
He had imagined the whole thing. He had come into the room, and all the rest of it had been no more than a mind-movie.
No.
But the pain had cleared his head. Dead people didn’t grab your wrist. Dead was dead. When you were dead they could use you for a hat rack or stuff you in a tractor tire and roll you downhill or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When you were dead you might be acted upon (by, say, little boys trying to put dead dangling hands back into bed), but your days of acting upon—so to speak—were over.
Unless you’re a witch. Unless you pick your time to die when no one’s around but one little kid, because it’s