Grandparents

Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived in a little house. Outside the house was a stone wall that the little girl could climb up on and sit on. The stones that made up the wall were all different colors; reds, ochres, whites, browns. The girl gave up trying to know how many colors the wall held.
Her grandfather, who the girl had always lived with, often set traps around the foot of the stone wall to catch the gophers and packrats that burrowed on their property. The girl would pull the gophers from the traps, unhinge their limbs the snapped-shut metal, and pick the fleas off the gophers' noses. She would wash the gophers with water from her and her grandfather's garden hose. The water tasted sweet in the summer and a bit like metal.
After she washed the gophers the girl would bury them in strips of cotton she cut from old socks. She buried them next to the lizards that got caught in the doors of the house or the birds that flew into the window in her and her grandfather's sun room. The little girl marked each grave with stones, but the stones would wash away during the monsoons.

to be continued?