Love Medicine

AL I

“It was so hard, Marie,” she gasped. Her hands were shaking.

The kettle clattered against the stove. “But I have used all the water up now. I think he is gone.”

“I prayed,” I said foolishly. “I prayed very hard.”

“Yes,” she said. “My dear one, I know.”

We sat together quietly because we had no more words. We let the dough rise and punched it down once. She gave me a bowl of mush, unlocked the sausage from a special cupboard, and took that in to the Sisters. They sat down the hall, chewing their sausage, and I could hear them. I could hear their teeth bite through their bread and meat.

I couldn’t move. My shirt was dry but the cloth stuck to my back, and I couldn’t think straight. I was losing the sense to understand how her mind worked. She’d gotten past me with her poker and I would never be a saint. I despaired. I felt I had no inside voice, nothing to direct me, no darkness, no Marie. I was about to throw that cornmeal mush out to the birds and make a run for it, when the vision rose up blazing in my mind.

I was rippling gold, My breasts were bare and my nipples flashed and winked. Diamonds tipped them. I could walk through panes of glass. I could walk through windows. She was at my feet, swallowing the glass after each step I took. I broke through another and another. The glass she swallowed ground and cut until her starved insides were only a subtle dust. She coughed. She coughed a cloud of dust. And then she was only a black rag that flapped off, snagged in bob wire, hung there for an age, and finally rotted into the breeze.

I saw this, mouth hanging open, gazing off into the flagged boughs of trees.

“Get up!” she cried. “Stop dreaming. It is time to bake.”

Two other Sisters had come in with her, wide women with hands like paddles. They were evening and smoothing out the firebox beneath the great jaws of the oven.