make less the depth
To clear the house, we begin with the worst: the fridge and the bedroom. I load the twin box spring and mattress, the bed frame, and the pickle jars for myself but can’t decide whether to donate the sheets or toss them with the frayed slippers and her homemade ketchup.
In that kitchen, at the table I didn’t take, she once pinched the helix of my ear, folded it into kolache, said she can’t do this to her own, the cartilage hardened into bone decades before. She fed me carrots. Not by spoon, but by baited palm, allowed me to put half-chewed pieces on the oak. Or maybe maple, or cherry, or walnut, or maybe bronzed pine. Memory only tells me, gloss and brown. Eat another, she said, her voice muffled by lobe stuffed beyond the tragus. Mouth agape, I wore the beak of the crow, the patience of the heron.
Chickadees harvested chokecherries in the knots of the Willow, where even I could climb. I’d learned to prune away the pits while perched in the chalice of the trunk. They were poison, so I did not eat, but I could still savor stained fingers as long as I returned what I had found.
The only papaya ever seen in the kitchen was the magnet that held the phone number for the plumber. The pineapple held the take-out café, the pear, the propane bill. The lemon-lime held nothing, as did the red apple, and the banana. All tasted the same as the centerpiece’s plastic plum and stem.
Is it cold out? It looks cold. High and golden amber, the wheat from her window reminded her of dead, November timothy. No. It’s July. Do you cook? I do. Do you bake? I don’t. Is it cold out? It looks cold. No, It’s July. Do you cook? Yes. Do you bake? No. Is it cold out? No, it’s July. It looks cold. It’s July. Do you cook? Yes. Do you bake? No. Is it cold out? It looks cold. It’s July. Do you cook? Yes, but I don’t bake.
We wouldn’t wait for spring and paid extra to dig the frozen ground. We stood ankle-deep in snow.
Call it the Hungarian notion, the swiftest acceptance, a new distaste for cherry candy canes, the adverse hatred of all pink and peach. No time-off except for the stomach flu and 102 fevers, and the only collapse, the only time knees bruise and refrigerator magnets detach, happens unbagging groceries, finding lemon cookies thought to be vanilla.
Timston Johnston is the fiction editor of Passages North and the founding editor of Little Presque Books. He misses the old Pringles cans and a time when his hand fit in the tube. He sometimes tweets @timstonjohnston.