I Conjure My Great-Grandmother In a Dream; She Gives Me a Lesson on Revision by Alayna Powell

I Conjure My Great-Grandmother In a Dream; She Gives Me a Lesson on Revision | Alayna Powell

In this version, I get my period for the first time, black and puddled between my legs. She  appears in the bathroom. I am just twelve years old, so young I still yearn for womanhood. Is this  a dream or a memory? I ask her, unsure. I am suddenly unsure of everything. She giggles and  holds out her hands, palms cupped, as if she’s prepared to release a secret.  

In this version, I braid her hair every morning. I count each strand. Time passes quickly in this  version. One day, after many days, we wake to find her hair is no longer hair, but thin strips of  silver, razor sharp. I reach to braid it and my hands bleed. I reach to braid it and my hands bleed.  I reach to braid it and my hands bleed.  

In this version, she keeps sinking deeper into the pull-out couch. My sister and I run circles  around the living room, around the wood stove, the TV so loud we have to scream, so we  scream. It’s a game like duck-duck goose, but all we have are chickens. Each time we make a lap  Granny gets sucked deeper. We can’t actually tell if she’s sinking or shrinking. The TV is on a  loop: Rachel Ray, Joel Osteen, The Weather Man. We all want to be the loudest, so we scream.  Rachel Ray, Joel Osteen, The Weather Man. By the time we catch the chickens, all that’s left of  Granny is her hair, two silver braids stuffed between the cushions. We scream. Rachel Ray, Joel  Osteen, The Weather Man. Feathers dance around us.  

In this version, she never died. She can’t. She’s sick of it. She squats on the front porch, knees  raised to her chest, pale nail polish flicking perpetually just over her toenails. You try livin’ uh-hundred and twenty-seven years, she says, all spit, no teeth. She wants to look good in her  casket. Her laugh comes tired and thick.  

In this version, she is twenty-five with no kids and no plans for them. She watches me cut my  hair in my bathroom. Her face changes shapes but, ultimately, it is still her face. I’ve seen so  many versions, I just know. While I cut, I tell her about birth control and abortions like she’s  never heard of them and she tells me I still have a lot to learn. I ask her to hold the mirror while I  cut the hairs at the nape of my neck. She asks to hold the scissors.  

In the dream version, it seemed her hands grew larger around whatever she was holding. In the memory version, I sunk into the toilet, choked by my own blood. In both versions, a frog was  hidden in the cup of her hands.  

In this version, her throat is filled with several hundred balls of cotton. She won’t let me take the  polish off, or even touch her toes (she’s ticklish). She spends hours on her back, open-mouthed,  while I pick lint and tartar from her teeth.  

In this version, she’s a young mother of ten, then eight, then seven.  

In this version, she’s a young mother of seven, and her husband just died, and she’s losing the  farm and the house too. It’s a nightmare. In this version, I spend hours organizing a GoFundMe  campaign. We receive so many thoughts and prayers. We spend all of it, recklessly, on self-care  treatments. I pray for her first pedicure, where they scrape layers of grief and polish from each  nail. 

In this version, she is only eleven. She hasn’t yet met the man who will become her husband,  who is already a father to his first son. We don’t know about him yet, or about any sons. We are just girls. We haven’t begun to contemplate what that might mean. When we bleed, we press our tongue to it. Add warmth to the wound and wait for it to end.  

In this version, we are in my last childhood bedroom, where I stopped being a child and became  something else. In this version, I don’t know all the things that have happened to me. I am in  high school, holding secrets with a loose fist. In the real version, I come out to my mother here,  and despite my way with words, it sounds like a confession. In this version, which is not the real  version, it is my great-grandmother who sits on my bed. I open my mouth. A soft white foam  billows out.  

In the extended version, she responds, everyone thinks about kissing girls sometimes, no need to  make a big deal of it but as soon as the words leave her lips it is only foam, yellow and sticky.  

In this version, everything’s backwards. I am the mother on the bed and she is the daughter and  she is my great grandmother when the foam begins to rise we are expecting it. Something like relief settles around the room. We’ve been here before. When I fold my hands around hers, yes,  it looks like prayer. But in this version we don’t bow our heads. In this version, we don’t even  blink.  

In both versions, the bathroom fills with frogs in seconds. They skip the tadpole stage, appearing  fully formed and fertile. See how quickly? she says. See how quickly a frog will leap from the cup  of your hands? 

In a much later version, we go on double dates. We fall in love over and over, sometimes several  times in one night. It is a love that has nothing to do with bodies.  

In this version, she hasn’t been born yet. It’s a dark night, but the moon is full-bellied, yellow.  The woman walks slowly, steps light as leaves underfoot. She is waiting. She smells pine. In  this version, there are no mothers. In this version, there never will be. 

A snippet of this essay, read by the author:

Alayna’s essay was selected as the 2025 Honeybee Flash Creative Nonfiction Prize winner by Kristine Langley Mahler. Kristine had this to say about the work…

“In “I Conjure My Great-Grandmother In a Dream; She Gives Me a Lesson on Revision,” the author’s speculative encounters with their great-grandmother move through versions of possible histories to assemble connections. Blending memory, speculation, and the potent truth that only arrives in dreams, this flash CNF brilliantly acknowledges the nuance of trying to tell another’s story while knowing we will always get it wrong. Hair is braided and cut, life is truncated and extended, love leaps across generations like a frog. A gorgeous reconstruction of what might, has, and can be.”” 

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