The garage smells of wood and oil and mingles with the perfume musk clinging to Mama. She perches on the truck bed in which you’ve cruised center-seated countless times. When you say goodbye to the truck—whose passenger handle will fail to work properly once you’ve reached tweendom, thus forcing Daddy to enact a double-pull trick you can never replicate—it will pull a beaded tear down your cheek.
But that hasn’t happened yet. For now, you sit with Mama and observe the shrieking, many-toothed blade of Daddy’s circular saw creating measured-twice cuts. He wears safety glasses but no earplugs. In adulthood, you will only speak to him from the left side.
Your index fingers forming loose plugs, Mama smiles and instructs you to fetch an aluminum tin from Nana. You escape the buzzing saw, basking in the smell of cornbread and strawberry cake filling Nana’s kitchen. She stands at the stove—always at the stove—when you inquire. She hands you the tin and a piece of bubblegum from a plastic bowl from the cabinet out of your reach. It’s not your favorite brand, but you accept the gift with sincere gratitude. You think, “I didn’t go to church with you because I wanted to.”
There are no words for the whorling in your stomach. Rearranging the magnets on the creamy, pocked surface of the fridge—a neatly chaotic assemblage of Fruit People and Berenstain Bears—you ponder the churns before hugging her linen capris in silent apology.
The garage cement is covered with a fine dusting of wood residue as if it had snowed during the Nanaquest. Mama sweeps it into a neat pile with the push broom that serves as your occasional dancing partner. From the saw stacks, you use your hands as scoops and carefully overfill the pie tin. You need the extra; the water will pack it down.
The rear of Nana’s house is a sanctuary: green and hilled, narrow and muddy. Vinyl siding and gray cinder blocks enclose you in a kitchen vividly constructed through your mind’s eye. The hills above have climbable trees and perfect rocky footfalls for the noodly constitution of a child. You’re gangly and scratched up, bruised and red and tanned from the days spent surveying the land.
In your kitchen is a collection of broken pottery and yellowed plastic you’ve saved from the hills. They are measuring cups for your tinctures and baked goods. If you’re lucky, Nana gives you an empty whipped cream container and slices her spoiling vegetables for your own spin on vegetable soup—naturally sourced and cooked by the strip of orange sun touching your kitchen in the afternoon. Bits of grass and pebbles create the broth of a thick, chunky soup you mime indulging. Mama and Daddy, too, mimic the actions with amused semi-smiles and private laughter.
You have a pie tin, so today is for dessert. In the evening sun, you bake with green stains on the nice plaid shorts Mama picked out, a wild grin full of crooked and absent teeth gnashing with anticipation of your artistry, your innovation.
***
Sawdust Berry Pie
Ingredients:
2 cups sawdust (sourced from plywood or 2×4 planks)
⅓ cup rainwater (sourced from the buckets Papaw kept out back)
A handful of snake berries for garnish (found in the yard and falsely claimed as poisonous)
Recipe:
Step One: Spread the sawdust into an aluminum pie tin, packing down the extra with your palm.
Step Two: Use your favorite, second-hand plastic cup to evenly distribute rainwater over the sawdust until soggy. Do not mix.
Step Three: Pick the reddest snake berries you can find, retaining the leaves and stems on half to thread through the wet mixture.
Step Four: Leave tin in direct sunlight until the mush turns golden and the berries shrivel. Step Five: Serve with finesse.
Erica Kitch is a writer with a B.A. from W.V.S.U. who works as a library assistant observing the wealth of human expression. Primarily a queer fiction writer, she also dabbles in think pieces regarding the starving artist archetype and the discontinuation of Sprite Ginger Zero Sugar. Her work has previously been featured in Centaur Lit (“Red Mother in Midday), BarBar (“Lyndall and Deidre Go Down Swinging”), and AC | DC (“Caller Number Seven Wants to Go to Heaven”).