IT WAS her time. She knew it. There was nothing left of her to give. And everything that could have been taken decayed before she did.

She lived her life, smiled her smiles, sighed her sighs, and shed her tears. She hoped her hopes. And how she hated her hates loved her lovers!

And she reared her children.

She poured forth her stories. I, a grandchild, was filled with it, her voices, gestures, spirit. And the big hugs and smoothing kisses when she scared us a tad too much and ruffled our tiny feathers. Or caused us to cry for sorrows we only heard but did not yet know.

It's her time. She never learned to read or write. She thought she was less of a person because of it. Yet her stories rang with great voices, shrill voices, sleazy voices, noble, and haughty voices. Voices that no paper can receive into its flat bosom.

Some of them have already faded, like pencil markings on old, yellowed parchment. Some of them have been lost, like sandcastles after the tide rose. Or those little elaborate SOS marks made by the twigs of the children of the shores.

Some have been perverted by time, twisted to fit the tales of the hearers. For the ears and brains of my listening kin were but shapely vessels, some large, some small or filled with some other substance, some slender, some tall, some broad at the base.

And they took of the sea of the matriarch's stories what they could. But the sea was endless.

Or so we thought. Until the time we saw her empty, shrunk, and mute in a coma. Then we knew her time has come although we small ones always thought she was bigger than time, it's traverser. Because she had pieces of it in her stories, like fish from grandpa's vast sea. She served it for us, meticulously dried, as was her method. It tasted so salty, so filled with the sea's essence, that we had to use tomatoes to tame it. It was always a hearty meal. The loot of a conqueror.

I was just another small container too. But I never heard enough. So I never knew how I got more of her stories, more of her voices, more of her soul than anybody else there, crying and howling as the last brick was cemented in place to seal her forever off from the mortality of our eyes.

Later, trapped in stories of my own, I would realize why I cried no tears when her time came. I was a small vessel of light material so her sea took me from the shores of reality.

And for a time I was adrift. But now I am submerged, in its heart. Her heart. Her voice does not reside in me, I reside in it and it moves, swirling in various woven patterns. Her sea is alive.

Time was on my side, for now. Until I will pay the debt of dried fishes, as grandma did.

No tears for me. I am of the sea. Let the vessels take what they can. There is much left to give.

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