Forty Years In Darkness Ends When I Take Her Hand

Synopsis

My grandma lived in the dark for forty years. She wasn't born blind. It happened back in 1948. Grandpa brought his new wife home, a woman from the city. She shoved Grandma hard. Grandma fell face-first into a pot of boiling hog slop on the woodstove. From that day on, Grandma couldn't see, and her face was covered with burns. They dragged her up the mountain, shut her inside a crumbling dirt shack, and left her there. For twenty years, nobody came. I was the granddaughter she raised with her own two hands. In my previous life, I tried to fight back. At fifteen, I walked down the mountain to find work. My uncle caught me and broke my leg. At eighteen, I made it to town and begged somebody to take me in. I had no ID, no papers, nothing. Nobody wanted a girl with no past and no future. That winter when I turned nineteen, Grandma couldn't hold on any longer. She died with a yellowed scrap of paper gripped between her fingers. Crooked letters were scratched across it: [Sophie, go down the mountain.] She'd been blind for twenty years. I never knew how long she'd spent practicing those words. After she was gone, I stayed in that shack and went numb. The years slid by like slow mud, and I died on the same straw mattress where she once lay. Now, I was thrown back. I was nine years old. And this time, I was getting Grandma down that mountain myself.