Bromton’s Mixture, by Kathy Smith, Published in Philadelphia Stories, Winter 2022

My grandmother fancied herself a glamorous woman, an old-fashioned movie star, but in fact she weighed seventy-nine pounds and had ropes of veins running up her arms.  She rarely changed out of her front-zip housecoat with crumpled, used tissues in one pocket and a pack of Pall Malls in the other. Her hearing aid squealed on and off as she neared various electric household appliances and she’d grimace as she screwed her fingers into her ear to shift the broadcast channel.

The vestigial efforts she made at grooming were rudimentary.  Each day she brushed her teeth with Comet cleanser to scour the tea stains and cigarette tar off of her teeth.  She wore shiny gold bedroom slippers that slapped her cracked heels when she walked like flip-flops, and she tucked the badly dyed wisps of her hair under a crooked wig.  Her fingernails, though thick and ridged, were always neatly painted.  By me.

I loved her.

My grandmother had terminal pancreatic cancer and was taking longer to die than the doctors had expected. Every day after school and on weekend nights I got to stay with her to make sure she drank her prescribed Brompton’s Mixture and no more. Brompton’s Mixture was a combination of potable morphine, cocaine, whiskey, and honey, invented at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London for the most ill of patients. I had a key to the fridge where it was kept in Dixie cups, and I knew it was important that I kept the key on a string around my neck. I did not know that she had become a morphine addict.

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