A mess of broken, uneven candlesticks have been thrown together carelessly to shape her lonely, aged figure. They are tied together weakly by the tangled floss and fishing line that are the remains of her once strong muscles. Strips of her skin clump together and fall obediently around her twisted hands, hands she uses to open peanut butter jars with, to cut my apples for me, to match white socks with white.

My arms look so pale and perfect, like plastic, compared to the rugged terrains that are hers. Rivers of dark purple veins flow in every direction, clinging on to every bit of flesh they can.

Her hair is as sparse as a desert and white as glaciers but kept warm with a fleece scarf. Under the fabric is a visible scalp with just the colorless cotton candy ghosts of hair. My hair is near black but glistens brown and coral and orange. Smooth and untangled and softer than whispers.

My dark chocolate eyes are the same shade as hers, but are not the same shape. The flavor of mine is young, ripe, not even two decades of light have shined in my eyes yet. Her eyes sag like depressed leaves in the cool night when the sun dips low. The next morning, they won’t spring back when the light returns. They are far too frail.

Teeth. Mine are large and a healthy shade of white, a mountain range of tough bone with a pink tongue in the valley in between. My teeth are guarded by barbed wire braces that cut painfully into my mouth every now and then. The pain, I can only imagine, is far worse in hers. What would have been a dark, dank room full of old prisoners has been reduced to the few aging survivors, stuck loosely into the decaying gum floors. They don’t stand next to each other, but isolated in every far corner of the room. Still visible, they peek out like weathered sailors when she opens her mouth.

And she speaks to me. Her tongue twists a spell of Cantonese, of words and sentences that I should be able to understand right away, but I don’t.

“Lauren.” She squawks. I’m attentive.

“You hungry?... Food in the…. You eat?”

Some fragments are familiar, however, like ‘food’ and ‘did you eat yet?’ and ‘you hungry.’ The script we review everyday, every hour almost, sometimes twice, and I know exactly what she’s going to say next, even if I don’t know what she means. She acts like any second I’ll crumple in a heap like an abandoned child’s toy, broken and rattling as it collides with the ground because it’s filled with nothing but hollow space and made of nothing but cheap material from her country.

But it’s not what words filter through those blue, crackled lips. For someone so ancient, so delicate in appearance, her voice quivers. Not the quiver of a tiny mouse in desperation and hope that the prowling cat won’t pierce it with its searching yellow eyes, sink those needle sharp canines into its spine. It is the quiver of a long, sturdy arrow that blinds you as it reflects the sunlight while slicing through the sky like a knife in butter. It lands precisely vibrating from the force, wavering from the strength it took to get there.

I hear this, her voice. With every syllable that strikes my eardrums, with every breath she takes, I smell Death. Pungent, and makes my face swell and crinkle like a sponge in disgust. The pure air seeps into her throat and bathes in her lungs and Death is released. It crawls through the chambers of her weakened heart, murmurs a song so quietly almost no one can hear but us. It becomes one with her blood, swimming violently through those winding streams, racing through her neck, her arms, her legs, her feet, everywhere, but she’s so old, she can’t feel it. And out it goes, exhale, clinging onto her tongue until she says it. The odor of ninety-five long years held together with a single strand of words that showed concern for only me.

And I respond to her in the best way I can. I could say, ‘no, I’m not hungry’ or  ‘no, I don’t want to eat.’ But I reply, yes, just so she can spend what might be the last days, minutes of her life, doing something for someone she cares about. What’s left of an elderly, brittle body in the service of a perfectly healthy one, so young and able, but incapable to turn her away. But I know this is how she will save herself. For someday soon, she will not have the strength to ask me those questions once more.

And I won’t be able to answer.