My mother had vinegar running through her veins. She passed it down to me, my brother, gave us plates of lumpia to drench in garlic vinegar sauce, pour it into the crevices and folds of rice wrappers, listen to it sizzle. The vinegar seeped out of our house, flooded streets, mixed with pepper, spice, peanut butter, soy sauce. Not everyone on our block knew that the storm was coming but it was, and our little brown bodies spilled into the creek just past Audubon Avenue. We took off our shoes, tiptoed from stone to stone, hunted crawdads. I tried to hide behind Wonderbread and slices of bologna, skipped rocks into seas of Coca-Cola, ate Sour Patch Kids and Jolly Ranchers till my tongue went numb.
But the mangos gave it away. And the avocado my mother used to mash up, eat with milk and sugar, papaya my grandmother scooped seeds from, cut into cubes to be eaten with her fingers. She showed me how. The lychee gelees I bought in bulk, when I moved in with my Aunt Remie in Washington. It turned out her backyard had a pond of vinegar too, and she dipped teacups into it, poured them on the fried nests of potato and carrot with one single gleaming shrimp on top: ukoy, like my grandma made. Like we all made together, years before, in a kitchen in Bloomington, Indiana, where the house was an island—a Pacific Ocean of vinegar and heat. We were told as children that we ourselves were bread, our bodies the color of it, cooked to perfection — delicious. A Filipino fairy tale.
Maybe the whole thing was a fairy tale because my mother made apple crisp too, rhubarb pie with the pink stalks from the garden, turkey on Thanksgiving, angel food cake. She knew how to do it: straddle the continents, duck into the fridge for spoonfuls of Halo-Halo and then serve us mac and cheese. But when she was dying we sat around her hospital bed on Easter morning with takeout Taco Bell. She opened up burritos and soft tacos, squeezed in the sauces — the hotter the better. When it wasn’t enough, we cut our own veins open, poured out our vinegar in teardrops and floods and whispered goodbyes. We puffed up heat in rings of smoke, like candles burning, watched the steam as it rose, curled into one, disappeared.
Jacqueline Goyette is a writer from Indianapolis, Indiana. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in print and online journals, including The Forge Literary Magazine, JMWW, trampset, and The Citron Review. She currently lives in Macerata, Italy, with her husband Antonello and cat Cardamom.