"Dandelion Soup" by Charlotte Hammond
Charles was a summer boy. Not born on the fourth of July, but in the heart of it. Before the war, his parents turned dandelions into soup when things were scarce. He remembers spiky buds adrift in broth the color of dirty walls.
When times were good, there were cans of beans, scooped out for Charles, Eleanor, mother and father. Cold and slimy out of the can, cold and slimy going down. Brother and sister played on in the evenings. On light stomachs they canvassed for pennies someone may have dropped into a sidewalk crevice. Visions of penny candy dangled in their minds. Craving was the thing. The chase. The game itself.
Charles retired in the eighties after forty years balancing the books for an electric company. Eleanor married a jewelry man and never worked a day outside the house. They raised gaggles of children a stone’s throw from one another. Dinner in each other’s dining rooms all summer. Brother and sister would feast through the evenings. Plates of tomatoes drizzled with extra virgin oil. Chianti as dark as a moonless night. Globes of mozzarella. Fish flown in from the Pacific. Steaks as red as rubies.
Their adult children could never keep up. They would joke, marvel at the appetites of their elders. They’d give Charles and Eleanor dibs on the choicest cut, the rich drippings. The last pad of butter on the last dinner roll.
Eleanor loses her mind before her older brother. She’s known to pocket tubes of lipstick. She plunges her diamond studded fingers into other people’s candy bowls, her face lit up like a switchboard.
Charles stays sharp. He’s dutiful to Eleanor. He drops in, brings her starlight mints, individually wrapped. He plays a grand piano. His wife and Eleanor and his grown children listen from the next room.
The summer Charles turns 80, he gets a pacemaker. No butter on the dinner rolls, his children say. Less steak. He has two homes, three cars, fourteen grandchildren. At Mexican restaurants he orders chicken, but pushes the beans off his plate.
In the heat of July, Charles’s yard is full of young grandchildren. Charles sees them from the piano bench while he plays. Their duck down heads canvass for dandelions. They bunch them in their fists like lollipops and blow tiny, empty wishes across his voluptuous, stretching green lawn.
When times were good, there were cans of beans, scooped out for Charles, Eleanor, mother and father. Cold and slimy out of the can, cold and slimy going down. Brother and sister played on in the evenings. On light stomachs they canvassed for pennies someone may have dropped into a sidewalk crevice. Visions of penny candy dangled in their minds. Craving was the thing. The chase. The game itself.
Charles retired in the eighties after forty years balancing the books for an electric company. Eleanor married a jewelry man and never worked a day outside the house. They raised gaggles of children a stone’s throw from one another. Dinner in each other’s dining rooms all summer. Brother and sister would feast through the evenings. Plates of tomatoes drizzled with extra virgin oil. Chianti as dark as a moonless night. Globes of mozzarella. Fish flown in from the Pacific. Steaks as red as rubies.
Their adult children could never keep up. They would joke, marvel at the appetites of their elders. They’d give Charles and Eleanor dibs on the choicest cut, the rich drippings. The last pad of butter on the last dinner roll.
Eleanor loses her mind before her older brother. She’s known to pocket tubes of lipstick. She plunges her diamond studded fingers into other people’s candy bowls, her face lit up like a switchboard.
Charles stays sharp. He’s dutiful to Eleanor. He drops in, brings her starlight mints, individually wrapped. He plays a grand piano. His wife and Eleanor and his grown children listen from the next room.
The summer Charles turns 80, he gets a pacemaker. No butter on the dinner rolls, his children say. Less steak. He has two homes, three cars, fourteen grandchildren. At Mexican restaurants he orders chicken, but pushes the beans off his plate.
In the heat of July, Charles’s yard is full of young grandchildren. Charles sees them from the piano bench while he plays. Their duck down heads canvass for dandelions. They bunch them in their fists like lollipops and blow tiny, empty wishes across his voluptuous, stretching green lawn.
Charlotte Hammond is a copywriter and fiction writer living in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, the Scores, the Same and others.