Paul: If they follow the recipe, they’ll be perfect
Baker, reading from the recipe: Step 1. Make it. It doesn’t tell me how.
This slope is treacherous
Female. Junior undergrad student in southeastern college. Forever changing my major. Sagittarius. INFP.
waxenneat
The piece I wrote and read in Los Angeles last week is now up and featured on Medium. This one means a lot to me.
When I was little, my father cleaned a church and dug the holes for bodies in its cemetery. He put those bodies in those holes and came home after midnight most nights. The cleaning and the body burying were enough to keep a roof over our heads. Me, my two older brothers, my father, and my mother.
A house came with the church sexton’s position. It was white stone with black shutters and a red door. It was three floors and costly to heat, but the church paid for all that.
The minister’s house was behind ours and he set up a line of string across the yard we shared — him, childless, and us desperate for green space to run around in. We were not allowed to cross the line.
That house was home until I was five and my father was fired for speaking to a wealthy church donor. He had hinted at the lavish ways the minister lived off of church donations. The minister had told him, “You are here to clean, not talk to people.”
As retribution, my brothers and I plucked every flower from his garden and hid them in our father’s tool shed. The church owned that, too.
The minister came to our door and called us horrible children.
I felt it for the first time then. Pest-like.