Salt

♦Salt Jane Todd Cooper Sunday she spotted, just a few rosy drops. Now pads can't sop enough. She doesn't want to lose it and she's done what the doctor said—nothing. Gone to bed. So why this bone-pressing weight? this weariness heavier than the velvet comforter she curled under at home, chilled to the pearl half-moons of her thumbs by the burn that throbbed, still throbs her womb until her body froze into a rigid arc under a mauve quilt someone was lifting. The burn flames and dims like curtains poufed out and collapsed by wind. Those kitchen priscillas almost splattered into blaze by bacon grease Literature and Medicine 11, no. 1 (Spring 1992) 91-92 © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 92 FICTION AND POETRY jumping red hot from the cast iron skillet. She'd frozen then, too. Papa's sudden hand rummaging the cupboard, a wide streamer, crystal white, snuffing flame to a smear of yellow in the black pan, then the metal stool shoved under her buttocks, how she drooped as though her life drained off. Salt. What snuffed out. What her now-dry mouth feels like it sucked. What the white-robed doctor and black-skirted nun who circle the table where, her feet in stirrups, she's strapped in place seem to be saying, not to her, though she hears them, but to each other. What does it mean? Salt. Salt it out. ...