Strawberry Demon Destroyer

Millie Beatch (she/her) // Contributor

Rachel Lu (she/her) // Illustrator

1. Mum’s going back home because Grandpa’s in the hospital. She’s sitting down across from me at the dinner table. Her huge, unused wooden paddleboard stretches out behind me on the wall; the table is slightly dented inward. She thinks it might be his time. Are you sad, I ask. No. It’s definitive. I feel like I’ve already grieved him, you know? she says.
2. In second grade we raise butterflies. Nobody wants to free them now that they’re so beautiful, but we let them go in the blackberry bushes. So many tiny orange and black butterflies circle the field that recess. I take one home that has a bent wing and decide to care for it with my neighbour Alison. My dad comes up with a name: Strawberry Demon Destroyer. One night we leave Strawberry Demon Destroyer outside in the rain, and he dies. I try to bury him but the ground is frozen; too solid for the grave.
3. Mum cradles me on her bed. She still has the sea-green quilt Karuna tore up years later. I need to tell you something: my mother died. Grandma is dead, she says. Is it bad that I’m not sad? Grandma was sick for twelve years. No, I say. 
4. The house floods while Mum’s still in Calgary. Grandpa’s delirious, thinks people are trying to kill him all the time. He warns his girlfriend that his daughters are out to get him. I sit in the library googling mad cow disease, zombie deer disease, prion disease humans, brain disease rapid onset. It goes on for years; the proteins in your brain misfold very, very slowly. We throw pink and grey towels on the ground and soak up the clear, narrow water.
5. I’m thinking of lost medical records, black teeth and gambling debts. Leaving home at sixteen; sickness, four little girls and a rose garden. He never calls.
6. My grandpa was born in Medicine Hat. Rudyard Kipling said Medicine Hat has “all hell for a basement” because of the natural gas below its plains, a sea of it. Medicine Hat the Gas City, the scent of opportunity; hot dogs, candy-coloured face paint, sticks of firework that shoot up like geysers. Dinner at 5PM, mom who prunes the rose garden, a Cadillac fixer-upper, all those scenes in Born on the Fourth of July of the American Dream before it explodes, blue fire in the sky. Four little girls with sparklers in their fists.
7. What do you think about death, I ask her. Nothing, because I don’t think about it, she says. We kick gravel in Blue Park. It’s cold, so I’m wearing Grandma’s crocheted hat. Why? When my neighbour’s dad died, I stared out my parent’s bedroom window at a bright, uneasy scene, red, white and blue, everything glowing like a hot plate. The light rolls in slow, cuts into the night. Why don’t you think about it? She replies steadfast: Because I’m not going to die. I nod because it’s true.