Sweater

I stare out the window,  eyes glassy from the stinging cold.
     “You’ve got to wear the sweater,” Mum says.
     I frown. I don’t want to wear the sweater.
     “It’s cold out and it’ll make your Gram happy.”
     I look at Mum with wide, tired eyes. “But I don’t like the sweater,” I say, “it’s itchy.”
     Mum sighs wearily. “But think about Gram, and how happy it’ll make her!”
     “I’m not wearing the sweater,” I grumble and cross my arms.
     We pull up to the home. It’s somewhere where all sorts of elderly people stay. That’s where they took Gram after she had her stroke. We exit the car, striding up the cracked pavement of the walkway and into the home. It smells funny and my nose scrunches up. It smells like mothballs and rot. The lady at the front desk checks us in and shows us to Gram’s new room.
     I don’t like the home, it smells strange and it’s eerily quiet. The elderly remind me of zombies, the living dead. Their bones are weak and their skins sags off of them too loosely. Their eyes stare off into nothingness. They are frail, they are dying.
     I scrunch up my nose again. I don’t like it here, not one bit. The lady from the front desk rears us into a room in the far back of the home.
      In it there’s a simple bed, a nightstand, a rocking chair, television and of course an adjacent bathroom. The rocking chair squeaks to the gentle swaying of a familiar older woman. She turns to me, and I’m not sure what I’m expecting, but she gives me a confused, squinty look and my heart sinks. 
     “Hello Gram,” I say.
      The woman shakes her head and stares at the floor.
      My fears have become reality.
      The woman in the rocking chair is no longer the grandmother I once loved, she’s an empty box, a carcass rotting away in this dump, caged up like some sort of lost creature searching for her soul. I know now that this woman is not the one I knew. The woman I knew died a long time ago. Mum pats my shoulder.

     “I’m not wearing the sweater,” I say.