Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

The younger woman looked tired, blinking her eyes slowly open and closed against the light, while her mother’s hands moved across her back—brisk, but tender. Something in her actions made me feel she was impatient, ready to be done with it, this mothering, and pass the task on to the next generation. Look, my mother said, that will be us one day. I suppose she meant that one day I might be pregnant, that I would become a mother and she a grandmother—what she saw as the natural and inevitable progression of things—but what struck me then, as I watched the two women, and what continued to haunt, was the absence of men.

Always you, never we.

oof

Though does it count if what you love can’t love you back? Unrequited love is still love, he said. But it’s never a great love. Can’t be. It’s one-sided.

perhaps a home is never a fixed or stable thing but something that can be carried with you and remade.