Prose

lemons with salt

when i was a young girl / of only a few years / i would get on the step ladder in my mother’s kitchen / reach into the fridge. i would rifle through the drawers, they were both labeled with what they were, vegetables / fruit. and the little switch that i would occasionally play with that thing that controlled something that i never believed really worked. how could that little slide control the fruit, truly. my mother in her bouts of a lazy depression would place fruits where vegetables went and vegetables where fruits went. and it didn’t matter but later it would / when i was fifteen and tired / when I went deep in the vegetable drawer, behind rotting kale, the kale rot and so would she in her bed. there was a cross-stitched plastic bright yellow bag with four lemons stuffed inside. i picked one from the top, not caring to re-wrap or tighten it with that little white holder they all have. do they have them anymore? 

i grabbed a dulled knife out of the wooden block that sat too far in the faux marble counter, yes this was a middle-class home. i placed the lemon on the counter too. i cut it into eight slices. Straight on the counter, creating small slices into the counter / that i would soon lie to my mother about / i sat at the wooden bench in my kitchen, a kitchen i can no longer remember. i sat and bit into a lemon slice, sucking the meat and juices out of it. sometimes my lips would pucker with the thrill of sourness spilling into the back of my cheeks. 

lemons eat juices eat me eat lemons. 

i did this, again and again, and again. until my little body had eaten all the lemons / my lips no longer puckered / the peels were left white like the holder / the plastic bag was left lonely in the back of the vegetable drawer. 

my mother asked me the next day where the lemons had gone. 

i lied my little ass off. 

years later, when i was twenty-two, no longer tired and my mother and i hadn’t spoken in some time / my grandmother and i sat at a mexican restaurant in the sandy hills of someplace, somewhere in california. the drive long the sun hot and the buzzards made songs that i didn’t know. i couldn’t recognize. when we ordered, she got something and i got tacos. she plucked five lemons from the bar that held cilantro and onion and sauces that were bitter but sweet and spicy. mexican food was always better in california / she told me / she took eight salt packets / in a booth / like the one in the kitchen i can no longer remember / she poured the salt on top of a bright lemon slice and ate the meat in one bite. she did not pucker her face or purse her lips. she chewed and smiled at me. 

she ate four lemon slices with salt / poured salt on the fifth and held out the lemon slice / cradled in her hand / to me. the salt / it’s not bitter / she said.