after Kim Parko

Explain the condition.

When my grandfather, years after his death, shows up at my front door, I don’t know whether or not to answer. You’re dead, I tell him, & he smiles, his dentures stained brown from the coffee he drank each morning. He nods his head & doesn’t say anything. I hand him a notepad. He writes I’ve been dead too long to remember how to speak.
 

Explain the circumstances.

It was a Wednesday. I was working on an essay about food sources & poverty in contemporary Vietnam. For breakfast, I had a bowl of Cream of Wheat, two scoops of butter & one spoon of sugar stirred in. It was eleven, maybe eleven-thirty. I wasn’t expecting any visitors.
 

Explain the mitigating factors.

He still had all his fingers & most of his toes, save for the little one of his left foot. I fell into a ditch & caught it on a branch, he writes down. What else? He was thin & though I wanted to shake him & ask what happened, it seemed as if doing that would loosen his bones too much, that he’d be crushed by my arm’s weight.
 

Explain the potential causes.

Resurrection. Jesus did it. He was never really dead. I was dreaming. He was dreaming. We were all dreaming & that dreaming created this shared dream. Death is part of the shared dream but it’s also part of something else & sometimes, maybe, these parts are disconnected, something from one side drifts into the other. He was a ghost.
 

Explain the danger.

Loving something without understanding it. Believing that what our eyes show us is what we’ve seen.
 

Explain the cure.

I ask him to write down how this happened. He draws a circle on the notepad.
 

Explain the effectiveness.

I let him sleep in my bed, go to the store to buy him something he can store his teeth in, a new pillow because mine is soft & makes his neck feel unsupported. When I wake the next morning, my grandfather is gone. I find the notepad on the kitchen counter, the circle from the day before no longer a circle, the top of it erased.