1991 Arctic White Buick Reatta Convertible with Red Leather Interior 3.8-Liter V6 (For Sassy) – Alec Ivan

June 17, 2026

The bulging velocity of a memory
screams past the point of no
return, which is the moment I realized
my grandmother had ascended
toward oblivion.

Some type of bird is chirping outside
after the rain. She’d hear it
and know exactly where it came from,
what it was doing here,
and where it’d go
when it was done singing.

The smell of the breeze through the wet screen
of the open window
reminds me of how tall the deck was
behind her house,
and how when it poured we’d stand there,
safe under the roof,
listening to the pattering, a graffiti of peace,
and reading, together, aloud,
The Giver.

I remember a lot,
more than anyone thinks.
I remember how

***

you bent over and poured red
wine into a lime-green bathtub. I liked to pretend you were
in one of your “modes,” the initiations gifted to you by
cocktail hours and
designer tableware.

I liked to pretend you weren’t really pouring wine
into your bathtub,
but that you were
filling someone’s crystal glass
to the brim
with decadence you cultivated within
years of time abroad with a husband
so unserious it was a wonder
you two made it out alive.

Something was wrong, and I liked to pretend
none of us pretended
like something was wrong; but really,
something was wrong, and as you tipped the bottle
down the drain
we wondered if you were ever
really there
for years

because you were always
so strange,

in a good way, though,
like how strange it is that datura blooms
downward, or how the bourbon never spilled
despite old, quivering fingers, or how the

1991 Arctic White Buick Reatta Convertible with
Red Leather Interior and a 3.8-Liter
V6

was sort of the last of it’s kind, an affordable
luxury available to everyone,
something glittering and otherworldly
in its dreams,
open to the public eye even though
it was so beautiful
it should have been
hidden away where
only I could
see it.

When you were re-homed in that
dim place with those
shining people,
I thought that you’d be trapped
in your own head because the
doctors said that sleep
was the only way out.

But there was no prison
which could suffocate the very
nature of your smile, the way you
lent yourself fully to the baby doll
laying prone in a small
wooden crib in the commons area,
where residents watched television
made decades prior
and the nurses distributed smiles
from faces that had seen,
already,
so much—

you cared for it like you would care for anything,
and soon the doll became not an “it,”
but a “she,” and the “she” was a stranger
to everybody
but you.

You were a theater in and of yourself,
an actress always;
Others stood
aside as you grasped your world and tossed it
into the fire
of a mind so whimsical
it was hard to believe
it was dying.

***

Then it came,
so slowly it seemed as if life itself
were a kaleidoscope of you,

and we kissed your hands
proclaiming you were the
best to ever
do it, whatever
it was, which
was anything.

There was a shudder there,
a tingle that I felt in your
fingertips squeezing one last drop
of love
from a heart so full of it
you could practically see the ventricles
pumping the stale air in your room
aside
to make way for the light from the
window,
which was always open

because from there you could see the
garden, and in the garden you could see

yourself.

***

A lot of my sister-in-law’s clothes are
hand-me-downs from her closet
back in Michigan.

A lot of her pearls have been
distributed to the most beautiful women
she’s never met.

A lot of her memories have been
seized in strong hands from where
cicadas emerge, clean, and
soft.

The only thing, actually, that we don’t have,
is that 1991 Arctic White Buick Reatta with
Red Leather Interior and a 3.8-Liter
V6. That’s long gone, and had been
for years even before she
passed. I always loved that car;
the way it drove even without my small body
in the driver’s seat; the emergence of an engine
sputtering smooth life
from warm northern summers which we
drove through
the winds of
with the top down
and our laughter
open.

I used to blame her,
in my silence thinking she’d taken the Reatta and
chosen to forget about it. And the older I become,
the more I realize
nothing could ever be
so untrue:

She’d sold it to a sculptor
when I was very young,
maybe ten
or eleven,
or even twelve.

The sculptor paid her,
took the car,
whittled it down into something resembling
not a car,
and made a staircase out of it.

I never saw the staircase,
so, in turn, I never saw
the car
ever again.

But I like to think
it sits somewhere
nice, somewhere expensive.
I like to think the staircase is poised
just as she would be in the threshold
of the doorway when we came for an
hours-long dinner of undercooked brussels sprouts
and my first tastes of cabernet.

And I like to think
the staircase
is functional. That one day,
I could mount it.

And maybe, if I thought about it hard enough,
the steps would lead me away from here. That they’d take me
up into the sky. And then I’d reach the top.

***

And there you’d be.