A Bar, A Letter, The Things We Don't Say

She studies the veins in her hands and at the tops of her bare thighs, under the chiffon of her skirt.

“I’m not a fan of skirts. I don’t wear them often,” she said to him.

“Why?”

“I feel naked in them somehow.”

And that’s how she felt lately, too naked in public, exposing parts of herself she couldn’t keep tucked away. Her legs are crossed at the ankles, shoes dangling off her toes, exposing her bare heel, raw and cracked, hardly lady like, the space between her legs just wide enough.

She uncrosses her legs, a red splotch on her ankle were she pressed the world down in onto her skin.

And there will be bruises tomorrow. A scar, thin as pencil scratch, runs on the white part of her underarm. She doesn’t trace it, doesn’t dig for her tube of lip-gloss to make herself appear occupied. She sits on the barstool re-crossing her legs and looking at her reflection in the window. The same girl from high school stares back with pools of black for eyes.

Her journal falls out of her bag that sat too close to the edge of the bar. She retrieves it and an unsealed envelope falls from between the pages. She tucked things away in there, news clippings, business cards, letters from her grandmother, slips of paper reminding her about this poetry reading and that new restaurant, but this soil envelope was unfamiliar and unmarked. She turned it over and over again in her hands letting the corners poke into the pads of her fingers. The bartender refills her glass, speckles of maroon dotting the corner of the white paper. She takes a mouthful without looking up, extracts the notebook paper and reads a letter that does not belong to her.

Bacon and Eggs

My grandmother would have made breakfast early that morning, to beat the heat before it billowed in through the open windows and filtered itself through the screen door. Her hair would be pinned up in a neat chignon with a few whips escaping from the morning draft she new would dwindle into the heat that would bloom like her hydrangeas on the front stoop, poufs of orange and marigold, she feels the heat blossom prematurely today as she lights the burners with a long stick match that she keeps next to the dishcloths, folded neat and stacked in the drawer next to the sink. She will retrieve pans from the sink and wipe a single trail of perspiration off her brow with the back of her wrist. She’d grease the pan the same way she bathed her children when they were infants, quickly, efficiently, leaving no crevice free of soap.

Bacon was expensive so she stuck to sunny side up eggs, using what was left over to scramble some with toast for herself, though she loved to dunk her crusts into the yolk. And when the eggs were done, cubed potatoes were thrown into the same pan, sopping up the already hot oil, salt and pepper from the eggs in their starchy goodness. She’d stand there in her housedress, never bothering with an apron.

“Just another thing I’d have to wash. Why bother?” By now my grandfather would come through the screen door, shirtless and barefooted, leaving his soiled boots from the garden next to the doormat. He’d retrieve a pitcher of orange juice he squeezed himself, pour a glass and throw in an ice cube or two. He’d offer it to my grandmother, kiss her hand and she would feet him some of her eggs with her free fingers.

*

They finish breakfast standing. Her hair begins to curl near the nape of her neck, strands dampened by a heat that has punctured through a tepid morning. The house is swollen with a sticky sweet humidity. My grandmother washes soiled dishes in the shallow bin on the sink, pausing to dip her fingers under a cool stream of water, stopping to smear them near her temple and a crossed her collar bone.