Tasting Death

Listen. My grandmother could taste death three days before it arrived. Not metaphorically.

She'd wake up with copper flooding her mouth, thick and metallic, coating her tongue

like old pennies left in rain. She tasted it before my grandfather's heart attack.

Before the neighbor's car accident. Before the mailman collapsed on our porch.

Last Tuesday, she called me at 3 AM, choking and spitting into the phone.

Said her mouth was drowning in it. More copper than she'd ever tasted. An ocean of it.

But here's what keeps me awake. She died that morning. Peaceful. In her sleep.

So whose death was she tasting? I've started sleeping with my mouth closed.