GASTROLOG by Erica Mosley
Dinner, circa 2005. Off-brand SPAM sliced, fried in an electric skillet, and arranged on a bed of Rice-a-Roni. Served with choice of sides: cottage cheese, pickled red cabbage, or canned pineapple.
We still cook in an electric skillet even though our neighbor, Butch, found us a secondhand stove and installed it himself. The electric skillet is a habit. Butch is a retired Chrysler plant worker and is in love with my mother.
“Yeah, buddy!” he says sometimes, for no reason, when he sees us over the fence.
My mother has some ideas about things, and especially about food. She believes, for example, that butter is healthier than margarine because it comes out of a cow, not a laboratory. She does not believe in processed food, yet our checkbook balance enforces a certain realism, so here we are, eating SPAM. We are so poor that we aren’t even eating real SPAM; it’s off-brand SPAM. My mother’s right hand flips the slices of off-brand SPAM in the electric skillet with a fork. Her left hand grips a cigarette. My mother is full of contradictions.
We eat. We are putting the dirty dishes in the sink when we see through the window that Butch is marching up our sidewalk. He often drops by unexpectedly. My mother curses and runs to put on a bra.
Butch’s love is unrequited, although my mother often asks him to change the oil in our car, or replace the floater in our toilet tank. She pays him for all of these things; she does not want to be indebted, or to let him think he should be expecting something.
Today he has come to announce that he has just bought us a 39- inch television with a built-in DVD player. It is sitting in the bed of his truck. (He knows we are poor, and hopes maybe this is the way to her heart.)
We watch the TV for a few hours, then start to feel guilty, put it back in the box, team-heft it next door, and leave it on his porch.
* * *
Breakfast, circa 2006. One mason jar of carrot-apple-parsley juice. One slice of ninety-nine-cents-per-loaf white bread, toasted, smeared with butter, not margarine.
The juice is for my mother. The toast is for me. My mother no longer eats solid food.
After undergoing several unsuccessful rounds of chemo and radiation to treat her recently discovered breast cancer, she has abandoned the medical industrial complex for alternatives: specifically, an all-juice diet, which seems to be working. She has a full head of hair and the tumors appear smaller on each successive scan. All day she sips vibrant orange carrot-apple-parsley juice from glass jars. She allows herself, once in a while, a potato. She still smokes, but then again you can’t give up everything.
We are not people who can afford alternative therapies. The juicer my mother shoves carrots into all day long is made of solid steel, is as heavy as I am, and almost as old. It is the best juicer on the market. New, this model costs several thousand dollars. We bought ours, after much finagling, for several hundred, from a woman three states away. A wooden rod which is used to push vegetable matter down a cylindrical chute (called – well – “the pusher”) broke in shipment, and Butch crafted my mother a new one on his basement lathe.
It is hard, sitting at the table, waiting for my toast to pop, to tell if my mother operates the machine or if the machine operates my mother. My mother’s arms move like levers: chopping vegetables for the machine, feeding the machine, cleaning the machine. She has been mingling too often with machinery, metal needles in her arms, synthetic chemicals in her veins, portacaths embedded surgically into her chest.
I butter my toast and leave for my classes at the community college. On my way home I will stop at the health food store and ask the dreadlocked, mustachioed produce man, on whom I have developed a crush, if the Jonathan apples are organic or conventional.
“Those?” he will say. “I’m pretty sure they’re organic.”
“Pretty sure? I kind of need to know.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
“I need to be really sure. My mom’s on a special diet.”
His eyes will say: “Girl, everybody in here is on a special diet.”
I will load my twenty pounds of carrots onto the conveyor belt and panic when I realize I have forgotten which credit card my mother told me to use, which one has the lowest balance. The cashier will say, “Do you have a horse?”
* * *
Lunch, circa early 2007. Chicken chunks and frozen vegetables stir-fried in canola oil in the electric skillet, mixed with rice which has congealed because my mother stirred it too often while cooking.
“This is great,” says Ian, the tall and bearded boy I’ve brought home from college.
My mother, smoking a cigarette on the back porch, snickers through the open door because she knows it isn’t and hates dishonesty.
She is not eating with us. She just finished her juice.
My mother doesn’t realize that Ian is not lying, that he truly is enjoying the meal, that he truly is this grateful, this unceasingly cheerful. He is an academic, a scholar with an interest in languages and the obscure. Loading his fork, chomping away happily, he is explaining to me how normal, everyday Anglo-Saxon words became profanity after the Norman invasion. He says: “The verb to fuck was a perfectly polite term for that particular activity. Then the Normans came along and it became obscene. You had to say copulate. You couldn’t say fuck anymore.”
Outside, on the back porch, my mother shakes her head. She does not like him. He does not understand why.
This is the first meal my mother has cooked for me in a while, because it is the first time I have let her. She begs me for meal requests, asks me what I’m craving, wants to know what time I’ll be done with class so she can have dinner ready for me. But I refuse. I tell myself that I refuse because I don’t want her to stand over a stove inhaling aromas of food she cannot eat. But that’s a lie. I refuse because I don’t want to be held down to a schedule. I’m excited about college and my extracurriculars. I eat my meals out of campus vending machines. I enjoy being busy.
Her illness, her need of me, has come at a very bad time.
* * *
Afternoon snack, circa mid 2007. Raw chicken ceviche, brined in lime and spices. Chalky white cheese, unpasteurized, home-pressed in a stranger’s kitchen. Followed by a dessert of carob-flavored crema, whipped from an indeterminate raw dairy base. (Later: Two steak chalupas, which I sneak out to buy after my mother dozes off in the armchair she now sleeps in because lying down has become too painful.)
Either the abandonment of the all-juice diet preceded the cancer relapse, or it was the other way around. I don’t remember. The skeptic in me says it doesn’t matter, hopes it doesn’t matter; it would have happened anyway; her genes are the culprit, not her food. Anyway, she is taking a new approach.
Once a week a raw food enthusiast comes to our door with a cooler full of bloody meat and illegal milk. He does not charge my mother for this. He feeds her for free out of the goodness of his heart, after hearing of her plight from a friend, because he believes raw food can heal even the most hopelessly advanced diseases.
He does not know that she only eats some of it and gives the rest to our dog. She can’t bear to tell him. She wants to believe him. She does believe him, somewhat, enough to eat an impressive amount of raw, free-range poultry. She believes him more than she believes the doctors, who tell her there’s nothing left to try.
But we have returned, largely, to our old habits: frozen entrees, bags of cookies, the occasional cheeseburger, off-brand SPAM. Months of all-juice stoicism left her ravenous.
Butch still comes by. He promises her she is beautiful, even with only one boob. “You’re no less of a woman to me, hon,” he says often. She is tired of hearing it. She never asked his opinion.
* * *
Meal between lunch and dinner, circa 2009. Irregularly shaped nigiri sushi, the fish dry and dark because it has taken us too long to assemble. Served with sides of tako sunomono (vinegared octopus), and okonomi yaki (pan-fried cake) topped with tiny green bonito (fish flakes) which dance and wave in response to the slightest current of air from our nostrils, as though they are alive.
My mother’s two biggest fears have come true. First, she is dead. Second, Ian has asked me to marry him and I have accepted. The wedding will take place after we graduate. For now I am still in college – transferred to a university, no less – which is something I feel she would be happy about if she knew. I rack up student loan debt by the hour. I work part-time at an ill-fated bookstore chain. I don’t have time to cook and even if I did I only have three heirloom recipes, which I learned back when my mother was alive and ate normal food: baked chicken, mashed potatoes, potato soup. That rotation gets old fast.
My best friend Jessica and I have decide to take a Japanese cooking class together as an elective, hoping to glean at least one practical skill from our English degrees. Tonight, the first class, we are divided into groups and given knives and vegetables. No one seems to know how to chop; my classmates are afraid of their knives. I realize excitedly that this is one area in which I excel; my hands move on their own, the muscle memory of carrot juice prepping. I peer over at Jessica; in the not too distant future she will fall in love with the daikon-wielding boy standing next to her and run away with him to Colorado, but neither of us knows this yet.
Neither she nor I eat enough of the octopus to become full; we return home hungry, ready for take-out. We have forgotten that our other two roommates have attempted to institute a weekly roomie-family dinner, forgotten that tonight is the night appointed for cooking together. No one has prepared.
The four of us stare at elaborate cookbooks, trying to decide on a recipe and draw up a grocery list. One of us – not me, obviously – calls her mother, who suggests spaghetti. “That’s quick enough; some ground beef, some noodles, jar of sauce,” the mother says. Somehow this seems too easy.
Before we realize it, it’s nine o’clock and we’re all too hungry to do anything but our usual routine, which is to go in separate directions and eat whatever comes to hand. One roommate exists entirely on pizza rolls. The other one eats only frozen vegetables cooked in the microwave. Jessica and I head for a drive-through, then sit on the futon in the basement to eat and watch reruns of Robot Chicken. I wash my burger down with orange juice, which I have come to believe goes with everything. I have even started a blog called Orange Juice Goes With Everything. It has maybe one post, and no subscribers.
As soon as the semester ends we will forget everything we know about Japanese cooking. We will promise to make our roommates a sushi dinner, but never do it. We don’t know where to go to buy safe fish. We don’t have any of those fancy sushi rolling mats made of bamboo.
* * *
Lunch for twenty-three, circa 2010. Potato soup, the one recipe I can remember in my blind panic, made from about four hundred organic baby potatoes too small to skin but which I have skinned anyway, along with my thumbs. I added too much water and the soup is thin. I have tried to thicken it with about half a box of corn starch. It is still thin.
Ian and I have been married for six months. Recently we were kicked out of the house we were renting on a semi-legal basis from the Episcopal church. (This is a long story.) Now we live on a small organic farm in rural Missouri, which we found through an internet database which pairs farmers with young delusionals willing to work for only room and board. This morning it was revealed to me that today is my turn to prepare lunch for the other workers and their families.
Once the twelve (or fourteen or sixteen; they move around too much to be counted) children have been settled onto benches and into highchairs with bowls of my sad soup in front of them, the adults ladle their own bowls and we sing:
Oh, the Lord’s been good to me
and so I thank the Lord
for giving me the things I need,
the sun and the rain and the apple seed.
The Lord’s been good to me.
Everyone congratulates me on the soup. “This is great,” they say. I know it isn’t.
After lunch we finish the day’s work. Ian and I heave fifty-pound bags of non-GMO feed onto our backs and carry them to the chickens. These are super special, four-dollars-per-pound chickens which roam free in meadows, digging in the dirt and eating worms. Or at least they will be in the spring; currently they are piled together in a heap in the corner of a plastic-covered high tunnel, shaking snow from their feathers.
There are no pigs to feed because a few weeks ago we shot the last one. We hung it by the back legs from the tractor bucket, burnt off its wiry hair with a blow torch, slit its torso with a chain saw, drained its bowels into a bucket, and then carried it in pieces to the kitchen, where we made it into sausage and ate it.
We are very in touch with our food now.
Ian and I had no interest in farming when we came here; we just wanted a newlywed adventure. Now, we are considering starting our own farm, or at least our own homestead. I have been shown movies about the industrialization of the American food production system, and I am very worried. I have decided I like knowing where my food comes from, growing it and killing it with my own hands. I think my mother would be proud of me.
After we feed the chickens Ian and I head to the fields, where we settle in to harvest two hundred feet of spinach row by hand. We pluck the leaves individually, leaving enough behind so the plants will continue to grow, our bare fingers freezing in the February air. It is miserable work but we feel that we are doing something worthwhile, something healthy.
When dusk falls and our hands are about to fall off we head back to the tiny shack we live in. It used to be a chicken coop, before it was retrofitted with electricity and a bucket toilet filled with sawdust. We also have a small stove, and on it I prepare our dinner: stir-fried beets served over rice, a recipe a couple of itinerant Swedes taught me when they came through here on their tour of agricultural America. If only I’d thought of this recipe for lunch.
We swill beer with our dinner, Ian’s first-ever batch of home brew, which he crafted under the tutelage of another of the farm workers. We have one twenty-eight-ounce swing-top bottle apiece, and are very drunk.
We are welcome to eat anything on the farm, but we don’t eat much meat; most of it is for sale, not for consumption. There is only so much I can think to do with beets and rice and spinach and potatoes. And so, on nights when we are particularly hungry or the work has been particularly hard, Ian drives me to town and we buy ourselves CAFO cheeseburgers at Applebee’s with our dwindling savings and discuss our plans for the future.
* * *
Dinner, circa 2011. Boiled lentils flavored with carrots, salt, and the broth I saved from cooking beans the other day. Served with rice, because I have learned from a classic 1960’s hippie cookbook that a legume paired with a grain constitutes “a whole protein.”
“That looks . . . great,” says Ian, home late from his job selling beer at the baseball stadium. It is a physically demanding job, carrying the equivalent of a small refrigerator up and down the stadium steps for hours, and all he really wants when he comes home is a steak, or about three-quarters of a juicy chicken. But I am convinced we should only be eating hand-raised, free-range, organically-fed meat, which we cannot afford, so now we are vegetarians.
Ian’s parents, with whom we are living (just for the short term, just until we figure-out-what-we’re-doing-with-our-lives), both ate a bowlful of my creation while watching The Big Bang Theory, then went to bed. They are good people. They don’t complain when I cook for them, but they don’t lie and tell me it’s tasty, either. Ian’s parents like pasta, burgers, pizza, pork roasts, potato chips, fast food. So do I, but I pretend I don’t.
“Let’s all go to Captain Deedle-Deedle-Deee’s!” Ian’s dad said yesterday.
“I think I’ll just stay home and throw up instead,” I said.
I treat them badly. I have forgotten how to have parents.
They don’t have any more money than we do. They have both been laid off from their jobs. They suggest we combine our measly resources and make a family grocery shopping trip once a week. I throw a tantrum and refuse, saying I don’t want my money blown on antibiotic-laden ground beef and hormone-laced milk. We fight. In Ian’s childhood bedroom I throw myself onto the Super Mario quilt his mother sewed for him long ago, and rage into the batting.
Doesn’t anyone understand I have food issues? That I am haunted by the possibility that my mother died because she stopped drinking carrot juice? That I have just spent half a year on a farm watching men slit the throats of sheep and hold them, dying, in their arms, and that I thoroughly, deeply understand the gift of meat?
I tell myself these and other nuggets, over and over, and cry my proud tears.
* * *
Dinner, circa 2012. Lambert’s Cafe in Ozark, Missouri, “Home of the Throwed Rolls.” Hen-cut chicken-fried steak with mashed potatoes and gravy. The optional sides of fried okra, fried potatoes, black-eyed peas, and macaroni-and-tomatoes come to the table in large vats carried by high school students in red bow ties, and are piled onto our plates. Except the macaroni-and-tomatoes. Nobody ever flags down the macaroni-and-tomatoes girl. We feel bad for the macaroni-and-tomatoes girl. Every five minutes a guy rolls out a cart, yells “Hot rolls!” and throws bread at us.
Tonight we are celebrating. Ian has landed a job teaching Latin full-time at a small local private school. I work in retail. Together, our salaries will raise us just to the poverty line, but to us it is more money than we ever dreamed possible, more than we have ever made before.
We are joined by Jessica – the former roommate with whom I still have not made sushi and who has not yet run off to Colorado; that is forthcoming – and her brother. A few hours ago, Jessica made her brother carry my mother’s old juicer, which she has been storing for me for several years in the trunk of her car, up the stairs to my third-floor apartment. He had to take a break on each landing. He accidentally slammed the juicer into the walls a couple times, and he may have slipped a disk, but he made it.
This apartment unit was once the attic of a private home, before they carved it up and jammed in random bits of plumbing. I have one window that does not close all the way and a hallway that goes nowhere. My kitchen is yellow and my bathroom purple. When my neighbor flushes her toilet my kitchen sink gurgles.
The juicer now takes up three-quarters of my kitchen counter space, of which there was hardly any to begin with. With our newfound prosperity my first plan is not to find a new apartment, but to buy organic produce and make juice every day, twice a day. I will go to the farmer’s market every week to buy grass-fed meat and brown eggs that still have feathers stuck to them. I will find a producer of artisanal raw milk. I have so many plans popping in my little brain, a lifetime of menus, an eternity of good eating, the amalgam of every dietary philosophy I have ever encountered. I will employ all of them, and Ian and I will be healthy and happy and we will never die of any degenerative diseases. But now, right now, we celebrate with hormone-injected chicken-fried steak.
After Lambert’s, we all go back to the apartment and drink an excessive number of margaritas. Jessica calls her daikon-wielding boyfriend in Colorado on speakerphone and we slur at him drunkenly for a while, until we get bored and decide that we need to take a walk. It is after midnight. We roam the neighborhood, and stroll through the local college campus. There is a giant metal statue of a grizzly bear, the school’s mascot, in front of the textbook-and-sweatshirt store. I frolic through the landscaping, shimmy up onto the bear’s back, and ride it like a bull. “Woo hoo!” I wave my hands in the air while Ian looks nervously around for cops.
Life is going to be great from now on.
* * *
Saturday morning breakfast, circa 2013. Store-brand bacon teeming with nitrates. Pale-yolked, thin-shelled eggs, laid by calcium-deficient, beakless chickens in a windowless battery. Fried in bacon fat. Large stack of homemade pancakes. As a stop-gap measure, a glass of probiotic home-brewed kombucha tea.
My husband has decided to write a diet book. He wants it to be the weirdest diet book ever written. The current draft includes a Socratic dialog and several instances of the word gadzooks. The thesis of the book is moderation: avoidance of both privation and gluttony, humble gratefulness for all foods be they from farm or factory, enjoyment of all things.
We have discovered that the salaries of a private school Latin teacher and a retail slave do not go very far, not now that we have to pay the rent on a real house. We write checks for car repairs, property taxes, and the utilities I use to cook our food on an unbalanced electric stove. We do not shop at the farmer’s market. We do not buy organic vegetables. I have come to believe that white flour is lethal, yet every Saturday morning I make pancakes and feed them to my husband. We eat pizza, pasta, burgers. We are doing well with the avoidance-of-privation part. I am full of contradictions.
Last night I woke up at 3 a.m. convinced I had uterine cancer, or bladder cancer, or both. I don’t know why. I don’t have any symptoms. I got up, drank some kombucha tea, diagnosed myself inconclusively for a few hours on the internet, then watched videos of cats falling off of things and running into things and being scared of things. I went back to bed. This morning, as I sop up the last of my syrup, I have forgotten why I thought I had cancer. I have forgotten much else.
When we signed the lease on this house we talked our landlord into adding a clause that would allow us to raise laying hens in the back yard. We never got around to raising laying hens. Our landlord is disappointed. We’re pretty sure he thinks less of us now than he once did.
* * *
Dinner, circa 2014. 11 p.m. Green peppers sautéed in olive oil, served on white rice. No salt, no seasoning, no conversation.
I watched nurses hook my husband up to EKG machines twice in the last seventy-two hours. Both times the nurses have forgotten to remove the paper electrodes from his legs afterward; I feel them against my calves in bed at night.
We have just returned from the ER, where Ian spent three hours lying on a gurney in the hallway because all the rooms were full, and where I spent three hours sitting on a chair at the foot of the gurney playing with the hole in his sock. The woman on the gurney six feet down the hallway was admitted with the same symptoms as my husband: chest pains, heart palpitations – but that woman was at least eighty-seven, and my husband is only twenty-seven.
We are too young for this.
My husband sits next to me on the couch, eating his peppers and rice, and is not relieved, although he has been released from the hospital, although the doctor told him this was absolutely not heart-related, that he is a young and healthy guy, that the palpitations were caused by a reaction to painkillers he was given for a pectoral injury he received while arm wrestling a student.
He is not relieved because the doctor also said this: “Now tell me about your high blood pressure.”
“I was not aware I had high blood pressure.”
“Who’s your primary care physician?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Well, you need to get one.”
I can hardly reconcile my husband of one year ago, that carefree, big-bellied man who swilled his beer and sang his psalms, with the frightened form beside me, this penitent refusing everything in the refrigerator, denying himself anything with a flavor. His hand shakes on the way to his mouth.
The coming days and weeks will be tense. We will check his blood pressure at the booth in the Walmart pharmacy department and he will cry in the middle of the soda aisle. Later we will drive to Walgreens to do the same thing on a different machine, hoping for different results, and in the car I will try to distract him with questions about Lee Harvey Oswald, about whom he has been reading. He will tell me how everyone who worked with Oswald at a New Orleans coffee company the summer before Kennedy was shot moved on to high-paying positions at NASA, every single one. This will work for a moment, but then we will arrive at the pharmacy where a technician will tell him to sit quietly behind a screen so his blood pressure can normalize, and I will sit on the other side of the screen thinking that if there’s anything that can make his blood pressure skyrocket, it is being told to sit behind a screen with his own thoughts.
* * *
Dinner, also circa 2014. Ribeye steak, rare, conventional, purchased from the “clearance meat” supermarket bin. Large salad of organic baby greens tossed with olive oil and vinegar. Lacto-fermented ginger carrots which may have gone awry. I am not sure. There is a little bit of white fuzz around the mouth of the jar. We eat it anyway. Moderate amounts of three-dollars-per-bottle red wine.
Yesterday Ian received an email from the website of the British Medical Journal. He tried to use an alias to sign up for a free fourteen-day trial so that he could read an obscure article by a Danish cardiologist debunking the lipid hypothesis. The email he received in response began: “Dear Sir Haversham Falstaff . . . ”
We almost did not sit down to this meal tonight because we almost died. We did not notice, before slapping the steak into the pan to brown, that a plastic tab from a bread loaf bag (which must have fallen from some ancient kitchen crevice, because we have not bought bread in months) was stuck to the bottom of the pan. The tab caught fire, melted, filled the house with melting-plastic fumes. We coughed, sputtered, opened the windows, turned on the fans, took refuge on the front porch. Ian made a heroic plunge back into the house to retrieve our cat, stuffed him into his carrier, and brought him outside with us. There was a tightness in our throats. There was much Googling of “melted plastic inhalation side effects.” There was a subsequent panic attack.
Standing on the porch, I asked him if he remembered the time he said the word fuck in front of my mother. He didn’t. He said I made that up.
We are not dead. House aired and freshened by a cold spring breeze, we sit down to our salvaged steak, remembering each in our quiet way how lucky we are to be alive, Ian a survivor of hypertension, myself a survivor of phantom uterine cancer. We are low carb. Ian has shed thirty pounds from his waist and forty points from his systolic. You can’t argue with results, and yet every meat-heavy meal now reminds me of the farm, of the animals we helped slaughter: the goats, the pigs, the lambs. I look at my husband as he cuts into his ribeye and wonder if he is thinking the same thing, if he is thinking of the time we killed 109 turkeys the day before Thanksgiving, if he is thinking about that one turkey that lifted its head while it was bleeding out, after he inserted the point of the knife behind its jugular and jabbed, if he is thinking of that turkey that turned its head at the moment of death and looked him in the eye.
My husband sips his wine. He smiles at me. I don’t think he is thinking of these things.
If an abundance of meat healed my husband, and if an absence of it granted an extra year to my mother, what does that mean for me? To what baseline should I adhere, as a preventative measure?
That juicer is still sitting there, on my (thankfully spacious) kitchen counter, staring at me. I have not used it since my mother died. Based on the serial number, it is currently twenty-five years old.
Last week I plugged it in. I turned it on. It worked. It was missing a couple parts, which are probably rattling around right now in the trunk of the car Jessica sold before she moved to Colorado. Thankfully they are the inexpensive, replaceable parts: “food grid #2” and “food grid #5.” I bought these over the internet and waited anxiously for them to arrive. I cleaned the juicer with a warm, soapy cloth. I bought massive amounts of conventional, pesticide-coated carrots and scrubbed them in the kitchen sink.
Yesterday, with my new grids inserted, standing over my juicer with a carrot in one hand and the wooden pusher made by Butch on his basement lathe in the other, I realized that I didn’t remember what to do. The juicer is finicky, comes with a million don’ts. Don’t hold the hydraulic press in the upright position for more than ten seconds or the juicer will explode, don’t allow pulp to enter the bottom third of the canvas filter bag or the juicer will explode, don’t follow apples with parsley or the juicer will explode, don’t, don’t, don’t. But it all came back. Muscle memory.
While pushing carrots down the steel chute I thought about all the time I spent juicing for my mother long ago, and about all the times I didn’t but should have, all the time I spent busy with other things. I could have been so much better. In her last days, a skeleton in a borrowed hospital bed in our living room, I should have turned on the juicer, though she had long given up on it by then. Between her hourly doses of morphine I should have made carrot juice and fed it to her with a spoon because – why not? – even at that late stage, it could have saved her. I believed in it that much.
My husband refills my glass. We are suddenly feeling merry. We make jokes about inhaling the plastic bread tab. “The blood pressure won’t kill me; the bread tab will, ha ha ha.”
Whatever. We drink our wine. We laugh.
Erica Mosley’s nonfiction has appeared in The Green Fuse.