Kitchen Explosion, The

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2002 by Eager, Arlene

It was the day the restaurant oven blew up.

You opened the door to put in the pies and

it flew at you with a bang! and a blue-white flash.

Daddy leaped over the bar shouting your name.

I came running from the table near the kitchen

scattering leaves of fifth-grade homework all over

the dining room. The kitchen was chaos

shards of dough and apples blown across the room,

pie pans clattering under running feet. The smell of

singed hair and skin and cinnamon. Night bartender,

Rheingold man, regulars crowding the doorway.

"Is she all right? Is she all right?"

Pat, the clear-headed waitress (army training),

her hands flying through the first-aid kit. Daddy

kneeling next to you, pure, gray-faced fear, unable

to do anything but hold your unharmed hand

and say your name again and again. And me.

Standing rigid on the side, pressing hard against

the stainless steel freezer.

How strange you looked to me, one eyebrow erased,

arms wrapped in gauze and Vaseline.

"Come here to me," you said. "I'm not hurt."

I did not move. Next to me, a whisper:

". . . world without end, Amen." Mrs. Russell,

teary, sweet old barfly, rosary in her knotted

fingers, slurring a prayer of thanks for

my mother's "deliverance,"

It was the day I understood mortality.

World without you

never unthinkable again.

ARLENE EAGER leads workshops in the study and discussion of poetry

in the Round Table Program at SUNY Stony Brook.