The Soft Foods of Her Childhood

by Eileen Frankel Tomarchio

Mike Kenneally

When her last teeth fell out, she pined for her earliest tastes. Day-old polenta, butter-fried and syruped. Vats of reeking bagna cauda, soaked bread. Bones of the dead made from almond meal, crackling under a dust storm of sugar. She gummed her knuckles raw with remembering. When she could no longer grip knife and fork, she stabbed at tomato casings with her nails, twined steaming angel hair through her fingers into cat’s cradles. Strands she rescued from the floor and shaped into crude letters on a dusty windowsill, her own name hardening, misspelled. When her toes turned purple and bloated, she pretended her slippers were warm Easter loaves, cooling. Felt the trickle of blood, imagined walking again, her body proofed and risen. When she could hold nothing down anymore, she studied the bottoms of pails for what she brought up, for things ancient, never digested. A snap from a doll’s dress, a Communion cross stolen from a friend, a backing from her mother’s favorite earrings, a milk tooth. When she was finally empty, she rubbed the small bowl of her stomach, the only roundedness left of her, the crazing of collapsed stretch marks, and tasted it again—the softest of all the soft known things. A stillborn’s fingertip, like an edible flower bud, a pansy petal on her tongue. Melting and sweet.

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Eileen Frankel Tomarchio works as a librarian in a small NJ town. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in LONGLEAF REVIEW, BARRELHOUSE ONLINE, X-R-A-Y, PITHEAD CHAPEL, LOST BALLOON, MAUDLIN HOUSE, and THE FORGE. She holds an MFA from NYU Film. She tweets @eileentomarchio.