fiction by Phyllis Bronstein, Winner of the 2007 Lilith fiction contest
They were all there when I came in, stamping my boots and shaking the snow out of my hair. It was during semester break of my first year at college, and I had driven a slippery, tense length of the Belt Parkway from my home in Cedarhurst to the ground-floor Brooklyn apartment of my grandmother's sister Rosie.
Grandma was playing canasta with Aunt Ada, her brother Lou’s wife, in the small dinette just off the entry hall, and she said in her loud, scraping voice, “Well, here she is. Here’s the brat.” But her face, pleated into a dozen smiling lines, said something else.