Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral

Donut Parade

34 Donut Parade That was the summer I got up in the middle of the night to squirt raspberry filling and cream into maple bars, a layer of grease crackling and shining around them like a spirit of goodness. I put fresh old-fashioneds on mint green plates and dropped coffee into plastic mugs. I let men pour their old eyes down my hairless legs, lift up their cups for more. They drank acidophilus milk. Their skin was stained paper and they sat inside it, backs against the fat red booths, staring at the comics, blank and fierce as fish. Two other girls worked at the Donut Parade, twins. They had long, black hair, innocent and smooth. They had long, thin legs, brown from the heavy sun that we caught in the afternoons, feeling the heat push at us, and at the lake, as if the water, twins, and I were, all of us, the same. They wore their shorts short 35 and their apron strings hung down like ribbons. At night, we went down inside parks, into ditches where the boys dragged kegs of beer. After the red plastic cups, we crawled behind bushes with boys who wanted to kiss us but in the morning we were back in the kitchen, our fingers thick with sugar. ...