Story on the Internet
On a hot summer afternoon three people, a grandchild, a grandmother and an elderly woman in a blue skirt and a white blouse are standing on an empty platform waiting for a train. There is no roof above the platform, so the sun is shining unobstructed down on them. After about 10 minutes of uneventful waiting, the elderly woman sneezes. The typical sneezing sound, accompanied by the typical back and forth motion of the upper body, is immediately followed by a strange “cling”. It is as if some metal or glass has dropped onto the platform. The sneez-woman pulls out a white, cotton handkerchief and presses it against her nose, then against her mouth, then she throws a terrified look into the direction of the grandmother and the grandchild. The grandmother returns the look and then her eyes start scanning the ground. Then she halts and points her index finger towards the left, precisely targeting the spot where it had landed at the very edge of the platform. “Get it and give it back to her.” The grandchild, eager and happy to safe the day without having to climb down onto the train tracks, jumps forward to pick “it” up, but then hesitates. “What is that?” the grandchild yells very loudly. The grandmother gives the grandchild a serious version of the “shut up and just do as I told you” look, whereupon the grandchild, again yelling too loudly, replies: “It's disgusting.” Before the grandmother is able to take physical action, the woman in the blue skirt, still pressing her white handkerchief against her mouth, approaches the spot. In order to win her as an compliance against the grandmother, looking for reassurance from her side, needing her as an adult witness and a future reference, to proof that when confronted with “this” closely, “this” is a completely different story, which due to the safe distance from which she sees “it”, the grandmother is unfortunately unqualified and restricted to evaluate the situation and to see for herself how disgusting that is. To greet the savior, who will explain the circumstances well phrased and in detail to the grandmother, therewith converting “punishment for not obeying an order” into “a celebration of independent thinking”, the grandchild tries to look into the woman's eyes.

But the woman just looks down, even more though seems to deliberately avoid eye contact. Slightly frightened the grandchild starts to sense that the woman might have her own agenda.
In front of “it”, she bends down. Because she still uses her right hand to press the handkerchief against her mouth, she only the left one is available for pickup. The woman tries to lean the bag of groceries onto her left leg that ends in an elegant black show with a little heel. But she is too nervous. The bag flips over and some tomatoes roll out. She lets them roll, grabs “it”, shuffles it behind the hand with the handkerchief, grabs the bag, turns around and walks away, all the way to the end of the platform. “What about the tomatoes?” the grandchild asks. The grandmother stares into some kind of air pocket and does not say another word until the train arrives, not even during the train ride.
The grandchild, sitting next to the silent grandmother on the wooden bench can't avoid to remember this one stupid morning. The grandmother was still sleeping. Having used the toilet, the grandchild stepped into the bathroom to wash hands where it discovered a glass of water on the sink. Some horrible pink, white, yellowish, half round objects were swimming in the glass. It took some overcoming to examine the situation more closely, form a vague idea of what this could be, test the hardness of the objects by knocking on them with a toothbrush, then taking them out of the glass, holding them on tip toes in front of the mirror, wondering how they would fit, but resisting to test because they smell a little strange, slowly but unavoidably making the connection…that these bizarre looking things most likely spend their days in grandmother's mouth, even show full front when she smiles and laughs.