assignment #21 - lily gardner: i, hammurabi

Last February, the chickpeas in the oven take an hour longer than the recipe says so that by the time we pull them out with the towels we use as mits, we’ve eaten the rest of our food, which is not saying too much. Into mugs they go, a scramble with the spatula as we dance around the kitchen - whooping.

I cup the mug with the little blue butterflies, popping them into my mouth, one after the other. As the boy stands behind me, waiting. Crack crack crack of the shells, splitting open. I keep throwing, addicted the rush when the molars hit and the cumin shatters into my mouth. I don’t want to hear his questions. “What is your story?”

“When is a time in your life that you’ve faced a challenge?”

In the back of my mind I knew I hadn’t faced any. At least none like the stories he was looking for.

Skip skip, win, checkmate doesn’t work when you can’t play by the rules. I, Hammurabi, promptly took a chomp into his arm. In an instant, my cousin was screaming. The folk singers still played without me, the first concert I missed all season. The next year, they were gone.

That’s my kind of strife.

It’s like baking a cake for your grandma, he says. Crack. Except you have no flour. Crack.

If the flour runs out then we drive down the road to Kroger and buy some. But they had to rush milk and eggs and flour up the hollers after the tornado to the grandmothers who had mouths to feed and bread to bake, lest their neighbors go hungry.

The first of the month can creep up on me. It doesn’t hit till I’m writing on my lined paper, sitting, waiting.

In the winter when the heat goes on, the line gets long, so much longer. They would start showing up on our ride to school and still be there when we can home.

But the drafts creep up through the cracks in the floor in the house that papaw built. That bitch Michelle - how could she have taken away the hot chocolate in the lunch lines? The kids are cold, but their parents feel the chill.

My aunt found God when the UPS truck crashed and my uncle discovered oxy. Her father, the postmaster, could never know. At work, her husband walked through the gates saying “slaves only.”

Their son works for the drug industry and voted for the man who keeps the makers of oxy in power. The barons fashion their own hollers to live in, right up the road from Wheelwright. Why’d you want to see the people you were making suffer?

She still calls him every day. We still vote for Mitch.

I know that narcolepsy is a medical condition but the only people I’ve ever met diagnosed with it are comfortable, nothing more or less.

I fall asleep easy at night. Trust fund girl and welfare queen, all at once.