The Last Meal
by Sarp Sozdinler
My mother teaches me how to make pierogi the night before her sentencing. The kitchen is already warm, slick with June. She lines the countertop with flour, slides the bowl of potato filling closer to me, telling me to pinch the edges tighter so the dumplings don’t fall apart in the water. We work quietly, the radio humming static. “You have to hold it together,” she says, meaning the dough, or me, or maybe both.
The lawyer calls at 7:45, fifteen minutes before the streetlights will start flickering on. He says my mother will probably get seven years, maybe less if she’s lucky. My mother takes the phone in the pantry, lowers her voice. I eavesdrop anyway, watching her shadow enlarge and contract across the walls. I don’t realize I’ve been pinching the dough too hard, and one splits open, creamy filling oozing out.
My mother catches me staring. “They’re just pierogi, for Chrissakes,” she says. “Not open-heart surgery.”
I want to ask what she did, what she’d really done to deserve all this, but I’ve been around her enough in my life to know it’s sometimes better not to ask. She returns to the kitchen through the back door and pinches the last pierogi herself, lines them up on wax paper like tiny, bloated ducks.
We eat by the open window. She stacks three on my plate, dolloping them with sour cream and caramelized onion. There’s a scent in the air: clover, or maybe just some grass that needs mowing. We eat in silence except for the clink of our forks. I chew slowly, trying to memorize the way her hair falls across her eyes when she reaches for her glass, the way her fingers shake.
She tells me not to visit her in prison. She says it the same way she tells me to clean my room, to brush my teeth, to wash the backside of my ears. Like it’s for my own good. I nod and keep chewing. When I close my eyes, I imagine the pierogi floating in boiling water, turning over and softening, then rising to the top when they’re done. I try to picture my mother behind bars, but I fail, only able to see her reflection against the open window, her hands on the sides, dusted in flour.
That night, I wake to the distant sirens of fire trucks out on the highway, beyond the woods. When the sounds die down, I hear my mother moving around the kitchen. I walk downstairs in the dark and find her at the table, slicing apples into thin crescents. She offers me one. “Couldn’t sleep,” she says, though she rarely does. I bite into the apple, its taste startlingly tart and cold. She tells me about her mother, how she used to plant dill and marigolds in the backyard, how her hands always smelled of earth and vinegar.
“She wasn’t a very good person, you know,” my mother says. “But she was good at pretending.”
I don’t know what to say, so I reach for another slice of apple. My mother’s eyes look glassy, tired in the liminal glow of the night. “The worst part of being a parent,” she says, in her misplaced, kitchen-table wisdom, “is that you can undo a mistake but can’t really unmake a thing.”
We sit in opposite chairs, with apples between us in the wicker basket, night pressing in through the windows. I ask her to show me the recipe again, and she gets up from her chair to walk me through the motions with her hands—invisible dough, invisible filling, all air and memory and silence.
Nearing dawn, the red-blue wash of police cars illuminates the driveway and makes us stop in our tracks in the kitchen. In the amplified silence, our old routines come to life—the water boiling in the kettle, the clang of a pot against the stove. My mother is already dressed for the occasion, her suitcase by the door. “You can freeze the rest,” she tells me, looking at the doughy, shapeless abominations we’ve crafted together. “They’ll keep for a couple more weeks.”
When the officers knock on the door, I stay in the kitchen and count my breaths. I hear her voice through the walls, calm and steady, the same voice she uses when she bargains with vendors over money, when she lies to telemarketers, when she wants me to believe everything will be fine.
I don’t see her off. Instead, I watch the steam rise from the sink, the shape of her cup on the table, the trail of flour on the counter.
After they’re gone, I boil more water, drop a handful of pierogi in, watch them sink and then rise, their skins turning translucent. I fork them out of the pan and chew on them one by one, slow as a prayer, each bite a keepsake in my mouth, each mouthful something I wish would last longer.
When I finish, I save the rest for later as my mother ordered, stack them in neat rows, and wrap them tightly against the frost. I promise myself I’ll eat them only when I want to remember her. Remember how to hold something so fragile, and how to let it go.
About the author:
Sarp Sozdinler is a writer from Philadelphia and Amsterdam. His writing has found places in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Wigleaf, Flash Frog, Fractured Lit, Pithead Chapel, Vestal Review, and elsewhere. His stories have appeared in anthologies such as the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction, and he was selected as a finalist for the Los Angeles Review Short Fiction Prize and the Passages North Waasnode Short Fiction Prize. He serves as the editor of The Bulb Region.