Farina

By Crystal Rodrigues

Silver tin plates filled to the bowl’s brim with Farina. A tight, thick skin stretched over the grains, making them shake like jello to the rhythm of Mama’s hips as she walked them to the table.

Someone told me to start by scraping the edges with my spoon—to peel away the white skin from the tin, because the plate sucks up all the heat and leaves the sticky Farina cool. I went along scraping the edges, making a smaller and smaller dome.

I have a faint memory of Papa sitting at the head of the table. He was in a mood. Mama’s voice, like a bird flitting in and out of the kitchen to where we quietly sat, sounded exasperated, snippy. She often spoke to herself. She set a plate in front of Papa and chirped instructions. I hardly understood his response because his words always crumpled together into a deep grumble when he was in this mood.

And the only times he wasn’t melancholic he was laughing with eyes like slits.

But after a while he was quiet and slow—only to be addressed by Mama.

I remember my brothers sitting next to me. Quiet as we usually were in Apartment 20J. I watched wisps of Farina exhale, leaving our plates and escaping to the streets of New York through barred windows.
Plates of Farina were always the same. They start out fulfilling but end overwhelming.

Leave Me

By Loan Le

When Mom left for the first time, she didn’t say goodbye to me. She was gone for only a day, but I waited for her in our living room, my hands pressed against a frozen window. I asked the snow to bring her home. It was nine when they found her and led her back. Her keys jangled as she opened the door. I melted into her arms and dug my nose into the crook of her neck, inhaling the frigid air and her vanilla bean scent, being careful not to touch where Dad hit her last night. My hands became entangled in her curls—caterpillars crawling along a tree branch in the spring.

We broke apart when Dad said Ariel. She set me down gently and I hugged her thigh, the highest I could reach of her. Dad held a blue ice pack in one coarse, clumsy hand and beckoned her with the other. She went.

I played with my dolls, and made them kiss. I watched Mom and Dad sit at the kitchen table, foreheads pressed together, so close that they breathed in and out of each other. He whispered promises to her. After bath time, she tucked me in, smoothing away wet hair strands from my face. Dad’s snores bled through paper-thin walls. Mom said that she was sorry, that she’d take me with her next time she left.

But I’m still here.