Let me keep my twirling in the grass,
colored chalk and hopscotch–
and my fears.

I held on tight,
whispered at bedtime:
Please don’t let her die.

Grandma’s scent–
the last time that I touched her skin
I cradled her like a child.

She was ninety-three
and I was
age-less.

Laura C. Alonso’s work has been published in In Posse Review, Linnaean Street, 3AM Magazine, SFWP, The Manifest-Station, and other literary journals. She is the former Senior Editor of Fictionline Press and former Fiction Editor of The God Particle, and her fiction has been a finalist in the Santa Fe Writer’s Project’s Literary Awards Program in 2001, 2002, and 2010, as well as a finalist for the Glass Woman Prize in 2012.