When my grandmother ceases treatment—stops saving herself for herself, stops saving herself for anybody—we read books we’ve borrowed from the doctors’ shelves. The doctors come to the house to retrieve them. They help us sketch dolls on people-lengths of butcher’s paper then show us where to cut. We roll miniature paper grandmothers through the downstairs typewriter, tap on x and x, and hang them for target practice on the garage wall. The doctors clap when we score a bullseye. We trace silhouettes and lay my grandmother out on photo-sensitive paper in the sun. Using bottles, balloons, and rubber bands, we consider how lungs ought to function. We consider what happens if lungs don’t function. When we know all we can, perhaps enough, we let the doctors out a side door so the neighbors don’t see them and tell.

            We wait until my grandmother’s sleeping, click open our kits, extract a jar of fireflies we pour down her throat. One escapes, crawls across her face before launching itself into the bedroom’s thick gardenia night to blink its lonely sex light.

            We pull down my grandmother’s nightgown. Fireflies flash within her lungs, illuminating them like lampions.

            “There and there,” we say.

            Her skin gives beneath the knife like a magnolia petal wilted tea-stained-teeth brown. White masses clump between her bronchial tubes. It should be so easy, like cat’s cradle. But the bolls are tangled within the bronchioles, and our fingers clumsy.

            Digital clock tiles tick over. We repair what we’ve damaged, pull up my grandmother’s strap and check her pin curls.

            She coughs and stirs. We retreat to the closet, where we trip over unslippered shoe-trees and golf tees and duck behind a mink shawl collar, its four corpses laid out tail to snout, glass topaz eyes staring at us.