Nonfiction by Abigail Mathews
Grandma’s refrigerator is the color of the world. It is everywhere.
When the sky is no longer dark, but painted with rising yellows, then the smell of the kitchen is nearing, and I am reminded of milk jars and oven mitts.
Oh, when the flowers finally bloom, and the yellow petals fall to the mud, I see cigarette smoke wafting out windows, and oven-crisped cookies sliding from the pan onto dirtied white floors, and Grandma’s refrigerator is humming.
And the bumblebees are humming, and their yellow hue is familiar.
If the soil were to be peeled back and the dirt dried by the yellow sun, then the grass would turn yellow and die, and the flower roots would turn yellow and die, and the leaves have turned yellow and died, and I wonder when it became Fall again.
It was just yesterday that the dragonflies nibbled my ankles, and the skin on my shoulders were freckled, wasn’t it? The air crunches again, as does my chest with my fiberglass inhales. My yellow lungs heave like the chest of my grandfather.
The Autumn air brings a stale smell, but it is not a painful stale, because it is the stale smell of grandmother, and you remember how she cooked for you while you sat at the kitchen table picking apart napkins, and she wore an apron lined with yellow lace.
And the lace was as thin as her skin and as yellow as her refrigerator.
Abigail Mathews is a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington where she is pursuing a major in creative writing.
