IFFY FICTION

She wore the ring on her wedding finger, though it wasn’t the ring she and Grandpa had exchanged that day in 1961. The gold band was topped with a floral arrangement of diamonds and enclosed by a curved guard. It sat in a trough of finger flesh that it’d begun carving out many pounds ago.

My head barely reached her waistband the first time I’d asked to try it on. I imagined it on my own finger, dazzling like the ring I might someday wear in a distant, incomprehensible future. She told me it was stuck, tugging it in demonstration against the plump flesh barring its escape. The only way to remove it, she explained, would be to cut it off.

My eyes widened, horrified as I imagined her finger being snipped away with shears, hacked off with one of the large, dull knives she kept in the kitchen. Her finger rather than the ring.

What a decision to make: live forever as a prisoner of this ring, the gold and diamond slowly choking her thickening finger, or lose the finger altogether. In my mind, the ring became a part of Grandma, as inseparable as her ear or her foot (but not the gangrenous toe they’d amputated).

Years later, I stood at her bedside, witnessing a moment in her 5-year-long, bedridden effacement. I looked down and startled to notice her naked finger. She might as well have been missing a hand. But her hand remained, along with all its fingers. The ring, it seems, had finally come off.

I expected to learn it had fallen off when her emaciation had reached a critical mass, slipping off, unnoticed, into the white hospital sheets. But when I asked, she was flummoxed. When had the ring been stuck?

I’d been lied to. Apparently, she simply hadn’t wanted me to try on this relic from a life lived before my birth.

Grandma continued to shrink into the railed-in hospital bed that had replaced her king, the extravagant headboard still looming incongruously behind it. When finally, mercifully, she was nothing but ashes, I thought the ring would come to me.

But now it graces my aunt’s finger, a small consolation for years of caretaking. Occasionally she lets me try it on, watchful, jealously guarding, as though she senses my desire.

It now chokes the same finger on her hand as it once did her mother’s, and I know that one day, not as soon as I had wished, but far sooner than I wish now, it will be mine to wear. Sinking into my flesh until I am no longer enough to hold it.