We Are All Orphans
by Cathy Ulrich
In the universe where the potato peelers are haunted, we are all orphans. We go to live with our older sisters in their apartments and rental homes, we get our own bedrooms and a corner of the bathroom for our soaps and shampoos. Our sisters go for late evening drives with stocky boys who will become heavy men, the kind who wear their pants low and belts slung tight, who let their guts hang. Our sisters wave to us through the open passenger windows as they drive away with the boys, our sisters shout good night, good night.
When they’re home, our sisters play radio-old songs and light candles that smell like musty birthday cakes. They walk around on their tiptoes, kiss us on the tops of our heads, tell us don’t dream it’s over, tell us we know that they won’t win.
They don’t have to tell us not to open the utensil drawer with its cutlery clack and rattle, they don’t have to tell us that there are potato peelers everywhere, that no factories make them, that no stores sell them, they just are. They don’t have to tell us be careful, our mothers have done that for them, since we were young, our mothers clattering spatulas and ladles and wine bottle openers in on top of the peelers, burying them junk-drawer deep. Our mothers serving baked potatoes in their skins, our mothers mashing brown-coated potatoes for holidays and in the utensil drawer, we can hear the shimmer of ghosts.
Our mothers told us, before they and our fathers died, there are doors that open and nothing is there, there are night skies that go starless black, there are ghosts in every utensil drawer in every, every house in all the world.
At night, from our little beds, we would hear the jangle of potato peelers and the ghost shine, and then our mothers were in our rooms with us, stroking our heads, shush, shush, shush.
In the universe where the potato peelers are haunted, we miss our mothers. We miss the soft kitchen towels they spread in the utensil drawer to quiet the racket, we miss their soft hands and shush now, shush now, we miss the way they knew where every slotted spoon was, every butcher knife, every half of a pair of chopsticks. Our sisters go and leave us in their houses, calling from their boyfriends’ cars as they go, hey now, hey now, going round the corner into the darkness where our mothers have gone. We sit up waiting for them to come home, we fall asleep with televisions playing black and white movies into the dark, we wake from sleepwalking dreams with potato peelers in our shuddering hands, the ghosts of our mothers in our eyes.
Cathy Ulrich usually leaves the potato peels on when she cooks, probably because she is lazy. Her work has been published in various journals, including Ligeia, Schuykill Valley Journal and trampset.
