On Thanksgiving

I make the cranberry sauce the way he always does.  
Zesting the oranges, leaving the bitter pith behind,  
before squeezing the juice out of the fruit. I slice the  
tip of my finger with the rasp grater, lost in my own  
distorted reverie, and stare at the beads of warm, red  
blood dripping onto the rind and browning on the  
inside of the peel. My mother soaks a ball of cotton  
with mustard oil before shaping it onto the cut and  
telling me to sit for a few minutes while she starts to  
boil everything on the stove. I lay down on my bed,  
try to contort my body into the shape of him. The only  
sound filling up my loneliness is the ceiling fan’s  
humming as I feel how much it hurts, floating through  
life, being alive, and imagine him sitting at the table in  
his home now, eating his mother’s steamed green beans,  
fried with cubes of tofu and sautéed with spicy chili crisp,  
soy sauce, and sesame oil. The warm banana bread she  
would send us when we were in school, when I wished  
that I could skip through time, have the ground cave in  
and swallow me whole. When he taught me how to cook  
spaghetti in the dorm kitchen, ignoring everyone around  
us as I watched him. Him mincing garlic, chopping the  
yellow onions. Him telling me how to slice the tomatoes.  
Him telling me when to stir. I still feel the ghost of his  
fingers tracing the faint scar on my palm from when I  
nicked myself with the knife, when he pressed the fabric  
of his shirt tightly against my hand, both of us feeling my  
heartbeat in the wound. 

SAMBHAVI DWIVEDI

Sambhavi Dwivedi studies English literature and creative writing at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.