I Will Destroy You

My mother loved sugar. Sweetness was a flavor rather than a sensation and found its way into everything: tea, cakes, and the many cookies baked at every holiday. Sugar, butter, some salt as the elemental base the women handed through our ancestral line. Sweetness to coat the hard times.

Sweetness was polite. I was raised to avoid swearing and was genuinely terrifying of cosmic damnation that accompanied cursing. Bitter words were unwelcome up and until one conversation.

Adult relationships are complicated, but to a child they were a misunderstanding. Surely if I asked things would be easy. Clear. Nobody would willingly hurt other people.

I will never forget her large eyes bulging in anger and the rupture in our timeline. There is only before and after she growled like a wounded animal,

“If you tell anybody, I will DESTROY YOU. Never forget that.”

I was almost ten. This was how the cookie crumbled.

Meringues and frosting go off the rails as sugary sweetness gives way to a dark reality.