The Golden Age
by Ulrica Hume
our mother makes us tacos: a vat of oil, her smile like someone sitting for a portrait. You call me Isabella after the queen. You are Ferdinand but toothless when you show me your smile without the two false ones. This is in the darkened theatre where I will play one of Macbeth’s witches, writhing on the stage in a grey-green tunic of webs. Sometimes we drive past a fast-food place, no expectations but that of radiance, ourselves, we don’t stop. Being young burns, excites, is felt from the inside out. She wants us to marry, you do. I give my no by decree. It is the first time I know myself to be not only patently impulsive but also capable of hurting another. When I call, years later, she tells me about the tumor in your brain, or my reluctance to love, a blaming silence to change things back, to stay in that kitchen.
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Author's Note
It’s all true—also, none of it is. Memory is the great deceiver. What happened then is happening still, and it changes. Depending on your vantage, this presumes a squaring of sentiments. Life is full of errors. Some are strangely beautiful though. If memory is a held breath, this story, ripe with folly, is a sigh. That said, it is possible that in a parallel reality she—the narrator—I am in a kitchen somewhere, making tacos.
Ulrica Hume is the author of An Uncertain Age, a spiritual mystery novel, and House of Miracles, a collection of stories, one of which was selected by PEN and broadcast on NPR. Her work appears online, in literary journals, and in anthologies. Find her @uhume.bsky.social.
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