Sookie Stackhouse sits like Alice Liddell, in her gloves, at the side of a pool of blood. It is an object without meaning beyond the fact that what was once alive, once home, is now dead. It was an animating force, and now it is garbage. It needs to be taken care of. It's a lovely, troubling image, this: the girl, in her frock, kneeling by the blood, gloves to the elbow, taking up her cloth and scrubbing it clean. Tiny against the tall white walls, spattered with the fight, and the hate. The way she defended her home. With Sookie on a date and Jason on the ground, with the whole town wondering if vampires are people too, she stood in this room and she told death to wait awhile. She fought with hands, down to the bone she fought, and with words she pled. Death's not blind, it's deaf.

It is a sign and a story but it has nothing to do with home, and less to do with Gran. What's to do with Gran is this: she was home. She took pride in her home and she opened it to everyone: Sookie and Jason, Hadley, Tara Thornton, Bill Compton. A woman's power, in her day, was her home, and she took full advantage. And when monsters entered, she revoked their right to entry like a priest to a vampire. Her home was the refuge at the end of the world: when your parents are dead, when the grownups turn on you, her arms were open wide. She was proud of her home as she was proud of her soul, picking and scrubbing at every mark and blemish until it gleamed. That's Gran. Not a body in a pool or a memory or a victim, but this house all around you. It's what she would want. And fulfilling that brings her closer than a blanket wrapped around your shoulders; fulfilling that, applying object washcloth to object pool of blood, means feeling nothing at all. When she dropped to her knees that was Gran, that was the sign and meaning of horror, a story about loss and the ground dropping out from under you and your blood-soaked knees. This isn't a story, it's an act. It is deliberate and meaningless, and deliberately meaningless, but it's what she would have wanted. The smell and the feeling of her all around, the silence where her thoughts once were: they all want the evidence gone.