One September morning a few years into our marriage, I found Joe in the kitchen eating last year’s Christmas candy with his coffee. He’d found the Ziploc buried in the pantry. Candy canes and holiday mix I’d kept for some reason and forgotten all about. He looked happy, clattering a peppermint pillow around his molars, smacking showily, so I didn’t mention the instant oatmeal I’d just bought.
Things weren’t great. We’d moved into a beater house far from family for a job he hated. Field mice were gnawing the knob-and-tube, and he’d hurt his back laying traps. Thanksgiving and Christmas were looming and flights were ridiculous. Last Christmas had been just us; I’d had to work holiday shifts in check-out lanes to cover bills. Months and seasons were becoming flybys. Next year, for sure. We were saying it all the time.
I sat beside Joe, unwrapped a mini-cane. The surface was gummy from temperature swings.
“Dad always called it January Candy,” he said.
“Tastes like Walgreens.”
Joe held up the Ziploc-ed mound. “Stalactites? Stalagmites?”
“Stalagmites. Stalagmites grow upward and spread. Stalactites hang.”
“You hang on to shit too long.” He took my mini-cane, licked it. “Apocalypse Candy.”
“We talking nukes or nerve agents?”
“So we can taste December when it’s a hundred every day.”
“Our kids, too.”
Joe twirled the mini-cane like a paper umbrella. “Think we’ll get to see the ball drop in Times Square before the shit hits?”
I bit into a ribbon candy. It tasted salty. “We’ll go see Manhattanhenge instead. We’ll take a boat. The kids’ll love it.”
We munched and we tried not to imagine too far ahead. Everyone bent again, like homo erectus. Every pantry long-raided, barren. Except for some January Candy hiding waaaaay in the back. Too way back even for the mice.
Eileen Frankel Tomarchio lives with her family in New Jersey, USA, where she's worked as a librarian for 19 years. You can find her on Instagram @gondaline26 and find links to her publications at https://eileentomarchio.webnode.page/
No comments:
Post a Comment