My grandmother chain-smoked Virginia Slims, the long, white, pleasingly perfect cylinders a permanent fixture in the corner of her mouth. As she shuffled the deck for solitaire on her TV tray, I noticed her silver hair had gone yellow in a streak above her eye, exactly where the smoke spiraled upwards. The wallpaper had yellowed, too, little globs of sticky nicotine pooling in textured crevices. Dad caught me judging. Told me to scrub up or shut up. I wretched as I emptied buckets of brown, stinking water into the gutter, fingertips stained, golden rivulets still trickling down the walls.
Stacy Bias is an emerging queer writer, shortlisted for the 2023 Glasgow Women's Library Bold Types competition, and published in Edinburgh's Little Living Room, Issue 9. Instagram: @_stacybias.