The Mighty Red

by Louise Erdrich

So it was, every teaspoon of sugar that was stirred into a cup or baked into a pudding was haunted by the slave trade and the slaughter of the buffalo. Just as now, into every teaspoon, is mixed the pragmatic nihilism of industrial sugar farming and the death of our place on earth. This is the sweetness that pricks people’s senses and sparkles in a birthday cake and glitters on the tongue. Price guaranteed, delicious, a craving strong as love.

You hit forty and it’s a going-out-of-business sale.’

‘Yeah, it’s hormonal. You’re slashing prices. Lowering your standards. Everything must go.’

The geese on the oxbow and those who’d been grazing on the cropped grass began a loud discussion that surged into sudden rapturous agreement. They took off in a wild rush, flapping up over the water, wheeling and at last arranging themselves in an ecstatic formation. They flowed north with the river, guided by its mystery, toward the giant puddle at the top of the world. ‘Ah,

they’re gone now,’ said Kismet. Once the language of the geese had faded, the two lovers who were the best of friends walked toward the streetlamps, twining their fingers together, sometimes stopping to sit on metal benches beside small new trees on the quiet main street. When they talked about signing papers to get legally married, they started laughing and soon lost all dignity and choked, snorted, burped, wheezed, even farted, adding to helpless hilarity, which made them ever more hysterical. In the year that followed they did not get married. They just kept making jokes about it,