recipe card microstories: mustard pickles

once a pickle, never a cucumber

The riverfront row house, where I rented a room my senior year of high school. Verna leaning against the kitchen sink, teacup in hand. Paul Harvey on the transistor radio atop an ancient Maytag. Verna: she might have been smoking a Pall Mall and if she wasn’t, the tiny kitchen reeked of it, seventy-some years of chain-smoking embedded in its walls. The peeling yellowed wallpaper. How Verna’s hand shook as she raised the teacup of blackberry brandy to her puckered lips. How my head throbbed from the party. On the counter, an old crock. The pickles tangy on my tongue.

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