How the Family Fights
Our mothers fought once. It was unpleasant to witness. Unlike when our fathers would. It was nothing like entertainment. They were cooking when it happened. They said things to each other that we weren’t sure they could come back from. They had their whole lives as sisters to pull from. We thought it was possible our families wouldn’t be family anymore. Whoever was chopping placed the knife down calmly. They pulled the hair of whoever was at the stove doing the stirring. The hair had been placed neatly behind the head for cooking and then it was wild and down once the tug of the hair had taken the hair tie. The yelling was worse than when our fathers did it. Their teeth showed less but what they said made them sharper. By the time the fight went to all the other rooms and out to the lawn, my cousin and me tried to undo any damage we could find. The pot was on the brink of going from smoking to fire. One of them had turned the knob all the way high to burn the sauce. We opened the windows; we turned on the ceiling fans. Outside, one set of parents walked one way and the other went the other. We had to climb on a stool to reach the alarm when it blared. We took out the batteries and put them on the windowsill with the plastic that covers the device, stopping them from rolling off onto the floor. We threw out the sauce in the garbage while it was still scalding. We could smell the hole it made in the bottom of the trash bag. We had to hold a new trash bag open with all four of our arms and somehow get the contents of the first one into the empty one. It was garlic, oregano, tomato, plastic. One of us took a towel and waved it so the smoke would know the way out the window. The other of us took the all-purpose spray and cleaned the inner lining of the trash bin. I breathed the chemicals in heavy because my face had to get in there for my arms to reach the bottom. Eventually, we got the garbage where it goes in the garage before it goes in the street on trash day. We wiped the splatter from the stovetop and let the faucet land hot water on the sponge in the sink until the red was gone and it went back to only gold and green. With the new trash bag in the bin, it felt in the house that the fight hadn’t happened, other than we were getting hungry. I stepped on the hair tie. I said to my cousin I hate this object. My cousin took it from under my toe, held it up close to our eyes, saw the hair was the color shared by our mothers, shared by us. We dropped it in the trash bag. It waited for whatever waste would pile on top of it. We thought about something we never had to think about when we thought how we might punish our mothers. We took out the takeout menus in case our parents would be so pleased with how we’d helped erase the fight that they’d let us choose dinner. We saw them coming together back home. They were close and being close. They held hands until they saw the garbage can on the street. They wheeled it up the driveway and back into the garage. While they made drinks they said to us, don’t we know that trash day isn’t until the day after tomorrow. They laughed and laughed like fights were funny or had to be for them to disappear. We stole crackers from the cupboard and went to our room to go to bed before sundown. I bet it’s in our blood to fight like that. And make up like that too. Our fights will look the same and there’s nothing we can do.
You could put your cousin’s eye out is something my aunt said to my cousin after a battery chipped the lip of the wood off the staircase behind me. It was the last battery in the package, thank goodness, and just a double-A.
I didn’t like when one of us was punished and the other one was pitied. But at least pity always felt like punishment, so I could feel the same as my cousin. My cousin could stare at a ceiling as long as it took for the punishment to finish. My cousin said a ceiling could be anything you wanted it to be if you had imagination to spare.
While my cousin was staring at the ceiling, until my aunt gave the secret knock on our bedroom door, I took the battery and recreated its path. From cousin hand through indoor air past my ear and into staircase step. It’s hard to forget how something sounded when it sounded the way it did because it barely missed you. Like your eyes become your ears and your ears become your eyes. Maybe if it was one of those batteries that goes in the big boombox it would have cut my ear where my ears weren’t pierced with the side that juts out to search for the positive charge.
I took the piece of the staircase that wasn’t a piece of it anymore and looked how its insides were just wood, and its outsides were just blue. It was just big enough it could scratch if I had an itch. I looked at that staircase and knew I’d remember it when I was grown. The sun hit it late in the day and I would sit on it as the blue of it got darker, down one step at a time until sunset.
I put the battery in my pocket. I put the staircase in my pocket. I went outside and heard through the window our parents laughing at cocktail hour. I hoped it wasn’t true that they got along better when me and my cousin were separate.
That was the summer there were cucumbers on the side of every meal. Our mothers would eat them right off from where they grew. We would eat them with vinegar, but before they would pickle. They would make cocktails with them with gin, lime, and soda. I’d dig out the ice cubes and eat them from their glasses once they’d done their job as garnish.
I dug into the soil that had grown the cucumbers. I placed the battery underneath, packed the earth back down and called it a seed. I pretended I was sick of cucumbers the rest of that summer. I never learned how to throw a battery away. The piece of the stairway in my pocket got lost in the wash. There was a hole in the bottom of my pocket that slowly became more hole than it was pocket. I couldn’t wait to eat a cucumber again, but I wouldn’t until I got away from that garden.
If we ever called anything that they did anything that we wanted to hold onto forever, we would call what they preached best forgiveness. We would be standing shoulder to shoulder, feeling like a spotlight was on us because of how hot it felt to absorb the things they said at us about one another. It was even then as you could feel punctures in parts of you you didn’t know would hurt that we would be working toward forgiveness. Their volume would go up, but we’d pretend that what they said was measured and thoughtful and for our benefit. They were the first people in charge of turning the parts of life we had already lived into the parts of our lives we were going to live. We would let them get it out of their systems by allowing it into ours. They would tire from telling us our faults. If they fell asleep, we would find them a blanket. We would all have tears dried on the sides of our eyes and we would blink however long it took to chip away the cracks of salt that iced over those parts of our face. We wouldn’t use our hands. Those would be for offering to forgive by the act of touch. My cousin and me would put our hands within the others. I’m not sure we would say words like I’m sorry. It was all for our hands to say by how soft they stayed. Maybe we kiss a knuckle to tell the other that the apology is complete, and our hands can be released. Once we forgave each other for any of the hundreds of things we’d done, we would take the momentum of that forgiveness. We forgive so hard one another that the echo does enough to do the same to the people in charge of us and our lives.
Niles Baldwin lives in Kittery, Maine. He has work in Sleepingfish, HAD, Heavy Feather Review, High Horse Magazine, Soft Union, and elsewhere. His first book, a novel titled Her Favorite Cow is forthcoming from Long Day Press in Fall 2026.