I learned more about Grandma after she died than I knew about her while she was alive.
Sad to say.
Her storage unit was full of analog things—puzzles, board games, dice, cards, and dominoes. A wall stacked to the ceiling with domino sets. Funny, the things we get absorbed by. I must’ve spent the better part of an hour lost in thinking about dominoes, gliding across neural networks, collecting wisdom from ages and places far away.
Dominoes is actually a blocking game, but it was used in an earlier millennium as a metaphor for cascading cause and effect. That’s how they used to make sense of the events that led up to the Ghost Forest: a geriatric authoritarian needed to prove his potency, the radical fundamentalists caught in his crosshairs banded together while the antagonist superpowers turned their attention elsewhere, until poof: nuclear detonation.
It’s likely that these dominoes, the ones from Grandma’s storage unit, the ones in my hands right now, were made with bones from the Ghost Forest. In the fallout, there was little infrastructure to support the mining of resources, the manufacture of hardware, the design and development of software. So they turned to their newly abundant resource.
There was a strict prohibition in most developed nations against trading in works made from human bones. Provenance, including DNA certification, became essential within the primary and secondary markets. But there was a vibrant clandestine market, the Collagen Causeway, where it was possible to procure art created from human remains sourced from across the Ghost Forest.
I recalled the memory of Grandma playing dominoes with me. Our nuclear family had just moved, and my new classmates were cruel. I’d been surprisingly silent, showing little vigor when slamming the tiles down on the table. Eventually, I broke down and confessed. The coldness of her interrogation terrified me: she demanded names and addresses. The dark clouds behind her eyes lifted the moment she had the information, her sunny disposition returned.
At school the next week, my former bullies shunned me instead. A rumor that followed me into adulthood surfaced then: Grandma had visited each home, sat for tea with the family, and gifted them a box of dominoes. As she stood to leave, she looked each child dead in the eyes, in front of their parents, and recited the following: “The dominoes I give to you are made from the bones of my enemies. I will make my next set from you and your entire family if you ever speak to my grandson again.”
I never talked to her about it. There was always time. Until there wasn't.
