Rings
Mom always takes her rings off when she cooks. She places them in the ceramic soap dish next to the farmhouse kitchen sink, or in a small glass on the counter, or in the pocket of her jeans until the next laundry day. Dark blue sapphires and cleanly cut diamonds lie in a pile on the counter, metal on metal, closer than they are while they decorate her hands.
The rings come off because Mom plans to make her homemade meatballs. I imagine her standing, back slightly hunched, at the kitchen sink wrenching her white gold over her uncooperative knuckles, taking each ingredient out of the cabinet, getting the meat out of the fridge, adding the breadcrumbs and parsley to the raw beef, then stopping for a moment when she notices the parmesan cheese is empty. I imagine her fingers fumbling with the pull-tab to unseal the new container, bone on bone, unable to grasp it firmly enough to tear it open.
When her forefinger and thumb are red and irritated, she will call me to the kitchen to open the container. I always help in small ways; I read the small print on the cake mix, crawl on the tile floor to retrieve the measuring spoon she dropped underneath the table, twist open the lid of a well-sealed jar. When I am finished, she will smile halfway and say thank you, honey in a way that hurts my heart.
The cold meat makes her hands hurt as she squishes and squeezes it together, muddling the meat with breadcrumbs and Italian seasonings, rolling it into spheres, placing each one carefully on a well-oiled cookie sheet. When the pan is in the oven, Mom leans against the sink once more and struggles to wash her aching hands. From fingertip to wrist, a deep subtle pulse radiates within her bones. Arthritic joints linger a moment longer underneath the stream of scalding water, the subsequent steam cleaning her rings that she will leave on the counter, fingers too swollen to put them back on.
Holly Hagman is a teacher and writer from a small town in New Jersey. She earned her BA in creative writing and her MAT in secondary education from Fairleigh Dickinson University. She continued her studies in creative writing, earning an MFA in nonfiction from Fairfield University. She is a nonfiction editor for Variant Literature. Her work has been previously published in Complete Sentence, The Citron Review, Porcupine Literary, and elsewhere.