Eustasy

At 90 most of her is thinning, her mind a sheet of paper with perforations. Yesterday she asked five times when she bought the car did that year Her red gloves with pearl clasps enter the tiny community center. A poll worker stands, . His hand reaching for her laminated cards. Before surrendering them she sets her back, recites by heart: address, phone and driver’s- license numbers, her breath borrowed from a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem taught to her in the fifth grade inside that buzzing hive of a one-room school. In the voting booth she lip-synchs her choice then pulls the lever holding it down way too long. The oily man’s head bobbles to her feet.