I wonder how many people go to great lengths to break into vending machines; not for the cash, but because a bum machine swindled them out of their rightfully bought property by refusing to give them what they paid for and then shamelessly mocked them by letting them look at it for as long as they want until they get into a nice long stew about it.
All I wanted was some Ramen. And because my hotel had Ramen in their previously non-offending vending machine, I thought I was in luck. Quick trip downstairs, bada bing bada boom, Ramen in my bowl. I should have known something terrible was going to happen the moment I looked down at those delicious freeze-dried noodles and saw that, ominously, they had no price tag or number. However, through the power of some impressive deductive reasoning, and by that I mean putting in quarter after quarter until the machine gave me some Ramen, I paid an exorbitant dollar seventy-five for one pack of chicken powder flavored Ramen noodles. Which, as everyone knows, goes for about nineteen cents at the grocery store. However, I knew when I got into this that I would be paying for convenience, so I grit my teeth and thought of England. But the real trial was still to come.
When I put in my next dollar seventy-five, the unthinkable happened. The wire circle cradling my beloved Ramen did not complete its resolution. There was my Ramen, sitting there, crying out to me, while its coiled prison did not let it escape. Without even a hope of knocking it loose, I stood at that moment at a crossroads. Another woman, a better woman, perhaps, would maybe have cut her losses at that point. Taken the one pack of Ramen, not a meal, certainly, but not nothing, either. I am not that woman. 
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This is the story of my grandfather’s death, but really it is about my grandmother’s death, eventually, and my father’s, inevitably. This all happened after my grandfather died, but before he taught us all about singularity and time travel. This all happened before my grandmother died, but after she stopped baking cookies. Above all, this is a story about cats, not dogs. It is about swimming pools, but only above-ground pools, pregnant with implausibility and rotting leaves. If you are the type of person to prefer your swimming pools heated, with a serpentine lagoon, you will not enjoy this story.
If this was a better story, I could tell you what parting wisdom my grandfather felt necessary to share on his deathbed, which was in actuality more of a death-driveway: unpaved but final. If this was even a marginally better story I could tell you about my grandmother’s face when she locked the peeling yellow front door of her house for the last time. Instead, all I have is the early imprint of a language interchangeable only with objects and ideas. We didn’t have cookouts or pool parties. We had mildew, mathematics, broken light bulbs. This was our language. Before my uncle lost his leg but after he won a Ford Taurus means more than we were happy. After my grandfather died but before he taught us about potentiality in quantum physics, we had nothing.
In plain English, he died of prostate cancer. My family never spoke English, not around each other. We knew the truth. He died of an overdose of memory, more specifically a protracted dose of tampered milligrams administered throughout the last years of his life, when he went back to work to support himself and they took away our fiery tongues. To give you a better idea of where we are, this is before my grandmother threw away her pots and pans but after she stopped sleeping again. This was before my grandfather died, but not much. If that’s not clear to you, you probably like lagoon-like swimming pools.
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