Can I tell you a story?

"Can I tell you a story?" Grandma asks. She looks sly and shy at the same time.

"Sure."

"It's a little scary and gross," she says.

"Go ahead."

I'm a little worried. Grandma has the early stages of "Lewy Body Syndrome" a type of dementia and gets things wrong often. Last year she was convinced she went out with her then-boyfriend and they had shot my grandpa and left him in the woods. Of course, he died in a nursing home after three years, where she visited every day.

"It's about snakes, you know how scared I was of snakes.
Anyways, we were watching them on the hill over there and there was a big snake. And they, the two of them were hunting for him."

She checks to make sure my eyes are following her pointed finger pointing at the building across the street.

"And we were watching and we saw these two birds come. And the big one was, like, he was training the little one, to be a bird. And they found the snake before the hunters and they plucked his eye out. They plucked it out and ate it."

She seems to understand that this is a "story" and not reality, but I'm not sure.

"They ate it and they knew he couldn't do anything because he had only one eye. So then they went back and the birds, they plucked the other eye out.

And the hunters, they saw this and we were all scared. And so they packed up because they knew he couldn't do anything. The snake just had to go to his little hole and he couldn't see anything. So he would be hungry but he couldn't get any food.

And the birds ate the other eye. And the snake. He was a big snake, he was like a grandpa snake. But there weren't any smaller baby snakes on the hill. Strange."

I don't know what to say, "Well I guess the grandpa snake needed a grandma snake to have babies."

She chuckled into her handkerchief. OK, its a tissue, but she snuffles into it.

"He can't see the hole now because he doesn't have any eyes. He can't poke the grandma snake."

She smiles as she stares out the window. In this story, did she conquer snakes, her biggest fear after her fear of looking silly or doing something inappropriate?