grapefruit is better with brown sugar

Esther heard soft exclamations from her parents as they scuttled around here and there, grabbing keys, opening doors, starting cars, driving down streets. The house grew uncommonly quiet and the silence seemed to crawl up Esther's spine and twirl her hair with slow, terrifying movements. Esther pulled the covers tighter to her chin. She closed her eyes as tight as she could and repeated over and over, through trembling lips "fall asleep, just fall asleep." As she balanced on the ledge that separated sleep from waking, Esther saw her grandmother walk into her room and sit at the edge of her bed. "Let's see here," muttered the old woman who had died two years before. She began to pat her hands down her body, as if she was looking for a lost pair of car keys. Her fingers, which seemed too many for each hand, climbed up to her wrinkled face and began to scratch at her eyes. To Esther's surprise the fingernails started peeling away layers and layers of skin which her grandmother calmly put into the pocket of her grey shawl. The woman peeled and peeled, murmuring things like "mhm, quite" and "just about there now." Finally, she said "Oh good, we've arrived" as one of her twenty fingers wiped away a thin layer of murky water. Almost instantaneously the woman's eyes began to shine bright like halogen lights on the moon. She reached into her pockets and brought out handfulls upon handfulls of the skin she had peeled from her eyes. She held out both hands to Esther; "See," the woman radiated, "just like onions." And she started to laugh. Without knowing why, Esther began to laugh too. "Yes," she giggled, "like onions." The two laughed and laughed and the grandmother began to throw fistfulls of the shredded skin into the air like wedding rice. The confetti skin sumersaulted and began arranging itself into a smooth, milky ladder in the middle of Esther's room. The ladder went up and up until it broke through the ceiling and into the sky. "Come on," said her grandmother with lamp eyes. "Let us fall through the cushion of the earth." And with that the woman threw off her shawl to reveal the body of a brown newt and with her twenty fingers and fourteen toes she climbed the stairs through the roof. "Yes, let's" Esther muttered and she settled futher into her warm pillow.