apple pie

after supper, we baked an apple pie with what we had. one red apple, one green apple, and a three week old tiny lemon, almost sucked completely dry of its juice. one sliced the red, the other sliced the green. the red slicer got jealous at the sound of how the green apple sliced. it was way crispier and juicier than the red. the green juice sprayed up, as if excited to be sliced open. the red apple sliced like softened butter. 

we laughed at the merging of the red and green apples for the pie, something we assumed nobody had ever done before. we felt like geniuses together, maybe we were. we rolled the tiny lemon for five whole minutes, hoping to ease the juice out of it easily when we cut. when the palms of our hand were raw and numb, we sliced the lemon. we each took a half, holding it like a baby bird in our hand, but then no longer like a baby bird when we squeezed it right onto the apples. the lemons squeaked together in harmony, the sounds overpowering our laughter. the apples glistened with their new acidic sweat. 

the one who sliced the green apple opened the cabinet to grab the sugar. both the salt and the sugar are in the same type of ball jar. the green slicer took a minute to figure out which is which, debated sticking his finger in to test, but then noticed the white flour stain on the bottom of the sugar jar from a previous banana bread and grabbed it. 

he poured sugar from the jar into the bowl of red and green apples. he put the jar down, looked at me, and poured a bit more in. we stuck our hands in the bowl and mixed them all around, our fingers scraping against each others, the sugar with lemon turning our hands into sandpaper. i realized i had a cut on my middle finger, as i felt the sudden sting. 

it was 10:15pm. we had to wake up early for work the next day. but we would not sleep until the pie was done and we were finished eating. 

i, who sliced the red, took out my blue ceramic pie dish. it had been purchased from an antique store four years ago, in hopes that some day i would use it and be a baker. i would be the girl who bakes, even if for nobody. turns out baking for nobody requires a lot of strength, which i did not have. the blue ceramic pie dish has since been used many times, starting first with a peach pie, made with the green slicer. something about the green slicer makes me eager to bake, maybe for those few moments where we can laugh at a lemon and touch our rough hands drowning in apples together.

i opened the oven door, and the green slicer slid the pie onto the rack, sans oven mitts. we set a timer on the oven for 59 minutes, because setting it for one hour makes the time go by much slower. we sat and played chess, knowing we will eat our delicious creation at 11:30pm, and sleep with warm bellies.  

dad's mirror

on christmas day at my childhood home, i had to bend down to see myself as i brushed my teeth in my dad's mirror. the unfinished wood bottom border of the mirror landed at my stomach. on the mirror were years old specks and flecks from the water splashing up, bouncing out of the ceramic white sink. 

i never came into my dad's bathroom as a kid. although it was seven steps from my bedroom, i only stepped foot in there a couple times. the bathroom was reserved for my father, and occasionally my brother. i never would have gotten in trouble if i'd have gone in, but it wasn't about that really. was part of it about not wanting to step foot in a bathroom that was owned by a teenage boy and an older man who wasn't very clean? possibly. but it wasn't my territory. and i have respect for people's territories. my territory was the downstairs bathroom, that i shared with every guest that came in here. 

the one time i remember entering my father's bathroom was when i was three years old. i wanted to learn what the heck my dad got up to every morning in there. i went over to the sink, saw his razor. and i turned my head up to look at the unfinished wood mirror. i could only see the top of my head. i thought, "hmm i've seen my dad shave his lips before, i'll do that. if he does it every day why aren't i doing it?"

    (gruesome part incoming)

i took the razor, and with a swift action more confident than anything i had ever done before and anything i will ever do in the future, i sliced my lips right open, in an effort to shave my mustache. i realized quickly maybe i didn't have the skill to shave, as i saw the blood dripping down onto the white tiled floor.  i couldn't see what had happened, i tried to stand on my tip-toes to get a better look into the mirror but it was no luck. my dad ran in with the biggest shock on his face at this horror movie esque vignette, scooped me up and took me downstairs. at that point my memory fades because i was at peace again, and memories tend to lean towards the startling. 

on christmas day i spat into the sink after brushing my teeth, a few droplets escaping the sink and hitting the mirror. i took my sleeve and wiped at the mirror, removing a few years of stains. 

piczo

before my time on facebook, twitter, and even myspace, i was devoted to the social network/website builder called piczo.

piczo was a structure-free myspace. it had a completely blank layout at first, and was used by me and a few other girls from my elementary school. if you weren't on piczo, you couldn't keep up to date with what me, maddie, jessica, and katherine were up to. we spent our days editing the HTML of our website, adding widgets, walls, chat boxes, and more. it was up to you, the third grader, to decide what your website would look like. it usually consisted of text, photos, and images that screamed what genre of a girl you were. girly = pink, shiny, glittery. sporty = soccer ball imagery. emo = black, dark. most people fit into one category. i chose girly.

after a few months of having fun on our piczos, my friends and i turned our sites into profitable businesses somehow. we displayed what we called "edits" on our piczo sites. "edits" were just filtered images of ourselves, blended with other images of ourselves, with cute text/icons on it. these images eventually made their way around our school, and girls became obsessed. they wanted edits done for themselves, and had no idea how to use photoshop, let alone put a filter onto a photo, which we all can do seamlessly today. the first couple ones, we did for free. then we would charge our friends $20 for three photos. i have no idea why we wanted money or what we did with the money, but it worked. and yes, copycats aroused from our school. other girls who wanted to get in on the action of making these "edits" but there was no real competition.

the chat boxes we added to our websites became a problem. anonymity was allowed, and while most people remained true and displayed their real name, often times an anonymous username entered the chat and wreaked havoc. it was clearly not a random person, as they would name specific people in our school and talk about them. these were the moments where i wished i could moderate my website, but i had absolutely no ability to block a chat box user. 

we even had what we know today as a facebook wall. and although i wasn't a chatbox anonymous bullier, i did often repost chain mail onto my friend's walls. and these were SCARY, threatening chain mails. not just a "you will get kissed on the nearest possible friday" chain mail. 

i remember one chain mail in particular that used to scare me to death. and wow i looked up one word that i remembered from it and found the original chain mail and holy hell it is so funny and clearly written by a 9 year old. 

"My name is Alexa Black. I have blue eyes and red hair. Don't ask why. Didn't I tell you? I am dead. My best friend Summer was dating a boy named Jake, who hated my guts because I broke up with him. I was sitting inside while Summer was in the bathroom and Jake came in and told me that Summer's brother had lost his ball on the roof and he wanted me tog et it. I got out a ladder and climbed up. I didn't see the ball. I heard Jake say "Goodbye Alexa." Then I fell to my death. Jake had pushed the ladder over. Jake lied to Summer and said that I jumped. That night I appeared by him and said "Goodbye, Jake." I pushed him off the bed and he got a concussion. When he told the doctors his story they thought he had hallucinated so they sent him to the ICU and tested him. When they found he was healed they sent him to an insane asylum. 
If you do not repost this to at least one other person, I will appear to you and kill you next week. Don't believe me? 
Case 1: Mikey was going down the street when all of a sudden he remembered he forgot too send this death chain to one person. He crossed the street and got shot by four bullets and got hit by a flying chainsaw.
Case 2: George was in his bedroom, looking up death chains on his laptop. All of a sudden, he saw me standing in the doorway. I started calling his name and then I took an axe and chopped his head off.
You have 4 minutes to send this chain mail to one other person or I will haunt you forever!"

there are so many incredible moments in this chain mail. i love the attempt at striking fear by the blue eyes and red hair descriptor. i am obsessed with alexa not being able to kill jake and just giving him a concussion, so iconic. i love how she has the receipts of her other deaths, although she doesn't say she killed mikey, he just gets "hit by four bullets and a flying chainsaw" and kudos to the author, because a flying chainsaw was definitely in my top 5 worst fears as a kid. 

i remember posting this exact chain mail to this friend's piczo site. i wasn't really close with her, which is why i chose her as the one person i shared it with. yes it's dark but think about it, i had to choose one of my friends i was ok with dying. well, it came back to bite me in the butt. she got so scared she told her mother and her mother called me and told me to never share chain mail on her daughter's piczo again. i had to find a new friend to post my chain mail to, one of my closer friends. this was hard for me to go through but luckily, none of my friends died. 

piczo taught me coding, sacrifice, and artistry. thank god for piczo. rip piczo 2006-2012, just a baby.

shopkeeper's wife

mary is the shopkeeper's wife. she opens the front shop door at 6:50am every morning, wipes her feet on the mat, then picks it up and shakes the mat off onto the street. she will not leave dirt, only remove.

she heads to the shelves and arranges the handmade candles in an orderly, militaristic line. looking at it straight on, there seems to be just one candle. 

she recalls making these candles a few months ago. the night she skipped dinner at her cousin's house because the wax didn't properly fold into the glass the way she liked. so she stayed up all night scraping at it. it's not how her mother taught her to make candles, but she liked doing it this way: meticulously slicing, carving, melting the wax again and again until the shape was to her liking. it also gave her an excuse to not have to go to bed and spend those few moments together when they were both awake. she liked entering into bed when her husband was sound asleep, turned over. she liked the challenge of not waking him up. she tiptoed, and felt like a masterful orchestrator as she did. she loved feeling the creek of the wood about to scream under her foot, and slowly putting more weight on the other to balance, a see-saw ballet that no one would ever get to watch. she folded her body, crawling into the bed as if she was 80 pounds lighter. she slipped underneath the covers without ever touching them. she lay on her back, sinking, replaying her stealthy entrance over and over again until she slept and didn't dream.

mary wonders why it's 6:59am and her husband hasn't come through the back door yet. he usually stumbles through at 6:58am, happy to see the lights on, the candles arranged, and a whole two minutes left to make his way to the register, sit down on his chair and get ready to greet his customers. 

she bites at her nails, smiling. she does one last dust of the dull metal spoons that have never collected any dirt, and slowly heads toward the wooden register chair, which has a gray tint on the seat from her husband's levis. she hovers over it. the back door creeks open. 

dinner party

over in the butler's kitchen, victoria was opening and closing the sugar jar, debating if she should add more to the sticky yellow dough in her favorite cracked green porcelain bowl.

the kettle squealed.

she swept her feet across the floor, kicking the onion skins under her humming refrigerator. it was five past five. she hoped the guests would be late, if not, they may eat undercooked biscuits. victoria plucked plump green grapes off the vine, holding them in her hands for a moment to feel the cold chill they stole from the fridge, then plopped them into a see-through glass dish with intricate flowers lining the edge. 

the kettle squealed.

victoria's hand gripped the oven handle, pulling it towards her. she stuck her face inside to peak. her face melted in the intense heat, her ears dripping hot wax onto the door. two minutes more, and the brisket will be done.

the kettle squealed.

she opened her freezer and took the ice box out, pouring square cubes into her golden carafe, dazzling and dinging as they hit the bottom. she took the squealing kettle and poured it over the ice, and threw nine earl gray tea bags in. she usually throws five. the strings of the bags disintegrated in the hot water.

she walked to her front door, stood on her tiptoes and peered through the tiny window. she slowly unlocked the door.