Life Lessons
by Kelly Morris

Once when I was little, maybe five or six, my mom called us all into the bathroom. My sisters and I crowded around the bathtub and watched silently as she tied a dry cleaning bag to the shower rod. She knotted the bag from top to bottom with what looked like mathematical precision before placing a bucket of water in the tub below.

“Watch,” she said, and then she lit the bottom knot with a lighter she pulled from her apron. 

The flames scaled the plastic ladder, and the balls caught fire, crinkling before falling into the bucket waiting below. My little sister Brynn, who was scared of everything back then, didn’t cry out. Even my sister Halle, was came out of the womb disdainful and jaded, looked astonished.

The smell was enough to make us squirm, but we didn’t talk as we watched those plastic balls burn. Even at that age I knew that our mom was different, and I knew it in the same way I knew she had blonde hair and brown eyes. Sometimes dinner was homemade soup and homemade bread and a salad, and other nights our mom would lie on the sofa and tell us to make our own goddamn dinner, was she ever allowed a night off, could we not fend for ourselves just this one fucking time?

We ate cereal on those nights. Halle poured the milk because she was the oldest, and as I remember, we didn’t mind those cereal dinners all that much. Maybe we preferred them. 

“Well,” our mom said with a disappointed sigh as the last of the dry cleaning bag fell into the water with a silent whoosh. “It’s really quite spectacular when you’re high. It really is something to see then.”