Amy Goldmacher
You’re making a cup of tea: you turn on the gas burner but it doesn’t light, and you keep twisting the knob to get the clicking sound and hoping it catches and meanwhile you’re just pouring gas into the air and you think there is a very real possibility you will cause an explosion but you’re determined to get the burner to light so you keep twisting the knob and expelling gas and trying to get the light to catch and you smell the gas in the air and you think you’d better stop so you twist the knob to what you think is the off position and suddenly the burner lights with a WHOMP but not an explosion and you still have your eyebrows, so you call it a success and you let the kettle do its thing while you go back to whatever you were doing and just as you get into whatever it was again, the kettle whistles its charming sound, and by the time you complete your thought and get up from the chair the kettle is screaming like an emergency siren and it’s not at all charming and it’s all alarm, and in your hurry to make it stop because you don’t want your husband to be disturbed by it you turn the knob the wrong way and the flames get bigger and the noise gets louder and you wonder why this happens every time and you’re afraid the neighbors will hear and think someone is actually screaming and it will lead to the police being called and the door kicked in and your stupidity will be exposed, or that the water will evaporate and the kettle will burn and then you’ll have a fire and the real fire alarms will go off, and everything will turn to ash and then the fire department will come and put out the fire with water and anything that might have been salvaged from the fire is now considered a total loss because of the water damage and your husband will blame you for your failure to accomplish the most simple of daily tasks and an internal voice is screaming like the kettle that you’re doing it wrong, you’re making a mess, what’s wrong with you, and you open the spout, primarily to stop the screaming but also to make sure some pressure escapes so the water doesn’t explode out and burn you when you pour and you pour the water, hoping enough pressure has escaped so you’ll escape being burned, but it splashes out of the spout anyway and the force of the water pulls the bag and the string and the tag into the boiling cauldron and no matter how quickly you pluck it out it’s going to make a mess because the tea will drip down the string and stain whatever it touches.
Amy Goldmacher is an anthropologist, a writer, and a book coach. She is the winner of the 2022 AWP Kurt Brown Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Essay Daily, The Gravity of the Thing, Five Minute Lit, and more. She can be found on social media at @solidgoldmacher, and at www.amygoldmacher.com.
Photo by Ioann-Mark Kuznietsov on Unsplash
