by Tina Kimbrell

First, have a head cold so you won’t taste anything but will feel the pop of skin and bite at the back of your jaw. Buy the plum at a Walmart on the way to the hospital. Sit in the passenger seat while one sister drives and another sits in the back. Try to think of the last time the three of you were together for a reason that didn’t have to do with death. Read the billboards sprouting from soybean fields: Dairy Queen. Next exit. Discount Fireworks! Next exit. XXX Adult Store XXX. Next exit. BBQ. Next exit. Worry that you can’t wash the plum, but only briefly. You do not have the energy. This is probably why you have a cold.

Remember the plum pits on kitchen windowsills: scrubbed clean and drying in the sun. Remember how you never asked your mother why she put them there. Did she plan to plant them? Remember how she’d squat in the garden in her flip flops, plucking Roma tomatoes from their vines, scooting along in the dirt with a plastic tub. The nights crushing tomatoes for sauce, stealing spoons full of juice, pulp running down your chins. The nights listening to the canning jars pop as they cooled on the counter after their boiling water baths. Remember the jars in the closet still labeled in cursive with Sharpie. Remember the grocery lists started and discarded and littered all over the house: in drawers, in catalogs, on envelopes. Remind yourself to start collecting them.

Think about plums in general: the shock of bright flesh under thick skin. Think about skin and what’s underneath, what grows thick in the lungs and the shock of blood on Kleenex after a cough. Hold the pit in your palm, hard, until you have some place to put it.