smudges

Her grandparents lived in this brick house guarded over by snapdragons and hadedas, both swaying swaying in the wind. The hadeda birds were smudges of brown and grey and the snapdragons were coloured and wild, like the dragons in your dreams. They leered and danced and scared away the unwanted from the concrete flowerpot. The grass was green despite the heat and the dripping humidity.

Her grandparents had brown hair and sunned faces. They collected dolls from around the world: sad eyes leering and staring. They festered dust, but were too precious to abandon. Her grandmother, the enthused collector, had a backyard filled with glass figurines. They glinted in the sunlight and made soft sighs when they fell in the wind. Sighing and swaying, the fragile figures were almost real when the sun fell on them a certain way. She liked to squint at them so that the crimson paint bled and smudged and sparkled crazily. She liked that her grandmother would let her play with them, even though they were glass and fragile and not really for children.