The Love Complex

Granny kept it on a shelf in the back of her closet. I’m not sure why she had to keep it hidden—but it was there, with the dried rose petals and baby teeth and locks of puffy hair. The name was written in a child’s scrawl across the lid.

She said she used it more often ten years ago than she does now. The bruises were worse then—she used it down there too, when it burned so bad when she peed that she had to grip the sides of the toilet. She also took it and rubbed it on the stoop, the doorknobs and their bedsheets—so that granddaddy had it all over him when he didn’t even know it.

Granny believed in putting action behind your beliefs, always quoting “Faith without works is dead.” Her little rusted tin of balm was her relic, her fetish, her rosary, her way of loving when the love was all tapped out.