Burn This House

Burned by Salt

18 Burned by Salt I learned to recognize seasons in that drought town of perpetual sun by changes in the quality of light as it sliced the rind of morning. By the time I’d aged five years, I knew what threshold of carpet on my bedroom’s floor the sunlight must cross before I’d be allowed to rise from bed: farther to the left in winter, to the right in spring. My child’s limbs whacked a dance beat on the mattress as I waited. At breakfast, tomatoes cut into fours in a melamine bowl of Lipton soup, not diluted enough to cut the salt, acids of a morning meal burning where I’d bitten my cheek from a scare in the night. When I rode along 19 on my mother’s errands, the fig trees lining every road worried me. With paper bags of pollen wasps stapled to their trunks, these gnarled, squat chessmen looked ready to strike after long thought, to sting the tires in their dust paths. I feared a curled limb might fly out, smack the car across the windshield the way my mother’s arm hit my chest when she braked for a red too quickly. She always asked if I was all right, swore it was a mother’s instinct. But I had darker suspicions. I thought my chest too like pulp of tomato flesh, too easily bruised, printed by hard impact. Or too like my tongue, burned 20 so quickly by salt, by nightshade. I kept my eye on the road, several blocks ahead, watched always for the next light, braced my back flat against the seat as I waited for the next jerking stop, for the lurch or limb against flesh, for the Saint Andrew’s cross of intersecting roads in a field. ...