| Allyson Kalea Boggess | ||
| Home | She eats curry on Saturdays Cayenne and coriander seed help her breathe. She burns cooking oil on high, dumps chopped yellow onion into the skillet, hangs her head over the steam. The recipe calls for ground turmeric. As she pinches the powder on the cutting board, it stains her skin and nails yellow. She browns garlic and ginger and lamb for dinner. against a wooden pew, admire the pot of orchids on the altar, and reach for bread with stained
hands.
She thinks about his hands, how she should have touched them before he left Last night she learned how to play seven-card stud, how to see his ten and raise it twenty, how to split pistachio shells with her fingernails. She said they tasted like knots of cured wood, slivers of smokehouse planks. She fanned her cards and slicked hickory skin with her
tongue. He smiled and splayed his cards over the rug, raking his hands over the pile of copper between them. He said his heart flush beats her two pair—nines and threes. She said wait. Nines are wild.
when the overhead lighting in the booth at Denny’s casts a sallow glow upon the plastic picture holder you will pull from your wallet ten years from now and hold out to your colleague while waiting for the waitress to deliver. The cracked plastic, yellowed with years will not do your youngest daughter justice. It will pale her—dull her heavy mahogany eyes and neutralize her smile. Your colleague will still squint and nod his head. He will still chuckle, “She looks just like her daddy,” and linger his lower lip a few seconds too long over his coffee cup. When you graze the stub of your fingernail over the plastic filter of her image you will wonder what it is that causes you to pause. The waitress will bring your breakfast on freshly washed ceramic. Three eggs, two strips of writhing bacon, an English muffin. Your colleague’s waffles will not suffer long, but your eggs will anguish and congeal in your silence. It is in the corners of her mouth, you will think. The way her eyelashes curl up at the edges.
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