Wishes - Writing Prompt #9

My grandmother is a half-Filipino woman who stands a staunch 4'10".  Every inch spunk.  I come from a long line of strong women, and she is at the front.  She practically raised six children, five of which were rambunctious boys, single-handedly.  My grandpa was in the Air Force, and gone a big part of their married life.  He didn't see my mother, his first born, until she was 18 months old.  He served two tours in the Vietnam war, and earned a flying cross for his bravery.  My grandmother once wrote him a letter accusing him of cowardice and running away from all of the children.  Like I said, spunk.  

She isn't doing well.  I have seen her age ten years in the last two.  Her salt & pepper hair is falling out.  Her gait is brittle.  Her long fingers, wrapped in paper-thin, cafe-Au-lait skin, shake constantly.  The other day I watched as my sister took my grandmother's frail, worn hands in her vibrant, smooth ones.  Her hands are a younger version of my grandmothers.  It struck me as odd, to see the same pair of hands at different times in its life holding onto each other.  She methodically clipped fingernails, and smoothed ridges with a faded emery board.  Then, dipping the brush, she painstakingly painted them the color of blushing, brown silk.  The color of summer sighing into fall.  A dying rose.  All the while, my sister murmured a string of questions in a soothing voice.  How is Uncle Andy?  Have you been to any good movies?   Have you seen baby Scarlet lately?  Her voice was answered by my grandmother's signature smoky-sweet one.  

 I sat by, watching the dust mites spin in the late afternoon sun that unapologetically entered the little kitchen.  My gaze finally settled on the ceiling fan that has at least twenty unbroken wishbones dangling from it.  It took me years to figure out why they were there.  I'd just chalked it up to being a charming family tradition.  Then one day, I stumbled across a magazine article about the tradition of WWI doughboys hanging wishbones from a gas lamp in an East Village restaurant.  This ritual is rumored to go back to the Civil War.  It is a good luck charm, of sorts.  They are kept up there so that all of the soldiers will come back safely.   Our relics have yellowed and curled.  Were I sacrilegious enough, I know that I could break one with a hard snap.  I'm certain that when time runs out,  I will have a sound fill my mind.  Not shattering glass, or tearing cloth, but a precise sound of a bone cracking, causing me to bleed internally.  Heartbreak is a sound.