Vanessa Attia

Grandma is sitting across from me at the dinner table. She spies me looking at her, not touching my food. Discretely, she draws up her hand from her lap. It is lily white to the point of near transparency, wrinkled and sunken; a large blue vein bulges out and runs across the top of the back of it.

She reaches to pick up a green pea from the top of the pile on her plate. She sets it delicately down beside her silverware, positions her fingers in an OK formation, and flicks it with surprising force across the table to me.