Flash Fiction Friday #20

I took this Friday as an opportunity to continue some characters I have already been working on--my little shut in and her librarian mother. A flashback. Not that you need to know that to read it but... well, enjoy.

I watched the bubbles rise in the heavy-bottomed pot, the pot set aside exclusively for split pea soup and for jam-making. Though not at the same time. Two burners on the stove going, two large pots and a lot of heat radiating from the countertop.

“Anything worth doing,” she said. Mom had a habit of using incomplete clichés—if it was common enough to anticipate the answer, she shouldn’t have to supply it.

“Is worth doing right,” I answered. “Or, is it that you just like doing it the old-fashioned way?”

We were making jam and it was spring, spring because it was batches of peaches and apricots. Those coral-orange, fuzzy fruits of spring. She had the sleeves of her collared shirt rolled up and an apron tied over the small arc of her lower stomach, her mark of aging. “When the old-fashioned way creates a product with a noticeable difference. Yes, I’m going to make it myself.” The other pot, the large sterilizing pot for the jam jars, was musty with age and smelled of oxidizing metals. It never had to be washed as it did nothing but bring tepid water to a boil between drying spells in the pantry under the flour.

“I suppose part of the joy of it is doing it myself,” Mom continued. “Doing something, and doing it well, that most people don’t take the effort to try. Creating something that lasts too.”

I itched my nose with my elbow, avoiding my washed hands, as I unscrewed the lids from Mason jars. “Sure does. Don’t we still have some peach left over from last year?”

We both stood against the counter and she bumped me with her hip and a smile. “You sound just like your father.” She set her chin and brows down in imitation. “So you are telling me that if the whole human experiment goes south and we are forced into subterranean living until the radiation dissipates, I will be eating nothing but jam?”

I, too, lower my brows and voice. “What about the crackers? What about my Tang?”

She laughed. “He was always the Utilitarian.”

“But not the Communist.”

She looked away from me, her mouth relaxing. “Why do you say that?”

I was wiping the adhesive seals with a dishtowel and shrugged. “I don’t know. Bomb shelters and the end of the world mean the Cold War to me. Preserving fruit against the Red forces of evil or something.”

“Preserving fruit against evil. I like that.”

We were silent for a moment as I measured out the sugar. A cleaner task, more suitable for me than watching the hot and splashing fruit, safer for the wall paper and less likely to require first aid. I was never a neat child. Or adult.

“I like doing it, I guess. Making jam,” Mom said. She was still focusing her eyes away from me, though I looked straight at her profile against the kitchen cabinets. “It’s symbolic for making my own universe right here in the kitchen, with only what I have. It’s a fight for individualism and against the melting pot of time. Time, making everything easy, disposable and the exact same.”

“Are you ready for the sugar, Mom?”

She looked over at the peaches, liquefied and thick, breaking apart and coalescing in the torrent of the heat. “Yes.” My job done, I went to the other side of the counter and leaned against my elbows, my face shining up at her. She sifted in a quarter of the sugar pile and stirred patiently.

“Makes me think of that quote.” She squinted her eyes. Tapped her fingernails against the side of the pot with a trill. “Something about a Viking, who laughed at kings, who laughed at gods, and lived only for self-fulfillment. Who stood on top of a conquered city, his sword stretched out, and said, ‘Why? To a life, which is reason unto itself.’” Her extended spoon was her raised sword, sticky and glistening. Only she could make such a grand motion and not splashed a drop. I would have gotten it in my hair, on the coffee maker, and smoking on the hot burner of the stove. “Or something like that, she finished.”

Another quarter of the sugar, another silence.

“Ayn Rand,” she looked up and pointed at me with her finger and her eyes. “Ayn Rand is a good one to read about that idea. About the power of the self and also about dictatorships, Communism.”

“Put a reserve on it for me, Ms. Mummy Dear!”

“Ha ha.”

“Now you are the one who sounds like Dad, Mom.”