Burnt Toast

My father thinks life is a smoking building and comes with a state-of-the-art burnt taste, like black toast. He thinks it’s useless, so he throws it away. What he doesn’t realize is that I love burnt toast, the scraps, otherwise thrown away. To him, I am burnt toast.

I see two young people walking together outside across the street. I have never seen them apart. I’ve been living here for ten years. I don’t know if they are a couple. They are smiling and walking fast. They don’t know I see them. But even in the white overcast light, no guards are down between them. They don’t see me, but they have covered up the burning smell in their lives with a somber, desperate happiness hoping no one will notice.

I remember my mother as they pass away from sight. Pallid and thin, bones protruding, breakable; skin yellow and stretched over tissue and muscle and bones. I remember her hands are tree branches, but she is not Mother Earth. The tree is dead and the soil is alive. The tree has refused the nutrients. Wedding bands glimmer loosely on wrinkled, tired fingers.

I think of the boy I used to love and how different he is from my mother. His body is full and the skin is thick and pulls away when I grab it. It’s marked by my nails in a passionate moment when he tickled my foot, and I clawed him, and I made him want me. The love of his life also marked his skin, and he showed me the spot. He wears it secretly within a hollow chest. He hides behind his smile and prides himself in knowing that his lips have touched a girl. But those lips have also spoken lies between soft hushes and breathless quivers on necks and sucking the cries out of lungs. Those lips have abandoned sweet words and burned the unwanted, worthless images of platonic love into brains after they have gotten bored with the same pair of lips. The burning memory reeks with misery and the tears are fire on my skin, dropping molten onto my bones, melting me from within.

There is a shallow whisper from my mother’s chest. I look at her.

“Breakfast is ready, but I burnt the toast.”

A shaky finger brushes away gray, tangled strands, skin red and swollen with the desire to remove the vows. The house is still and smoky. I turn to the window and notice his car is gone. My father is not here. He will not smell the burnt toast again.