I close my eyes to see it.
My mother is smashing hundreds
of ketchup bottles over the dining room table.
The mahogany one.
The one Uncle Chad spent over 700 hours carving.
The one where he lost the tip of his first two fingers
to the jigsaw.
How he told my brother and I that if he ever caught us
playing power tool operation again, he’d hack off our whole arms himself.
It is the one we spent every Thanksgiving reminding our family how thankful we are for the bottling plant down the road.
But tonight or maybe last night it was rumored that Paul Mitchell threatened to burn down the factory.
The whole town came out for the arrest.
The whole town donned rain boots
The whole town painted in genetically modified tomato.
Children splashed in it like it was rain and made angels as if it were snow. I guess my mother wanted to recreate the whole scene hundreds and thousands of times over.
My mother is still dressed for work. But none of it matters anymore, because ketchup moves at a glaciers speed through the dog door and in the direction where we keep all of the farm equipment in the barn.
She is not crying or angry, just sort of sobbing.
Tonight I don’t care.
Every splash of ketchup that lands on my jeans the more it becomes clear that my mother is digging. Digging for the life she buried in every bottle of ketchup she spent 35 years bottling up. I don’t feel sorry for her. Only for my dog who is too scared shitless to come inside.
When my mother walks over and kisses my forehead I just feel out of place, like those photos of families above the fireplace on television.
Her nose getting in the way, she tries to hug me. I let her.
Her flesh farts and I remember that I am leaving on a Megabus for Chicago in the morning
and that it may never come.
Not until the breeze carries away our tomato town.
Not until the river floods away the steams and seeds.
Not until my mother stops digging away for ketchup out of a bottle.
-sonja lynn mata
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