The Best Breadcrumbs

“Tell me about your dreams”, his mother says. 

She slices through a cool cucumber that seemed to have lost all its juice. He wants to say that he won’t eat this powdery mildew; that she will one day end up with a fungal disease if she lets her vegetables sit around the bottom drawer all month long. 

“What did you say?” She asks, tilting her head to check if the knife needs sharpening, as if she is speaking to its’ edge. “I can’t hear you. Come, sit closer. Tell me about your dreams. You said you dreamt everyday of the things that you see everyday… tell me about those bits of everyday that you dream of.” 

She pretends not to be prodding into his life to control it with love.  

She assumes that she is not the custodian of his dreams or the curator of his subconscious. But she sure is. Aren’t all mothers? And more so, the fathers! Aren’t they the culprits of everything that is life-steering on a cellular level? 

Unlike his father, his mother always gets away with pretending that she doesn’t poke into the nooks of his thoughts – Julie Andrews voice and all – which makes her endearing, acceptable, forgiven.  

“It’s weird stuff, Mom,” he starts. “Like last night, I dreamt of a plate of calamari with the crumbliest coating of breadcrumbs. I am yet to find a restaurant that serves calamari this good!” He exclaims. 

Her nose twists as she finally detects how dry and old the cucumber had turned, but she chucks it in the salad bowl regardless. 

He goes on, “There was also a bowl of rice topped with a tiny square of butter – some of it melted, some of it not. There were beautiful tomatoes, which didn’t burst when we sliced through them. They were yellow and red. The yellow ones were the size of over-ripe hormone-treated cherries. The red ones were the size of under ripe green plums and we had to pluck them from the vine. The table was decked with white linen. The fabric was cool to the touch. We were having white wine—“ 

“Oh but you can’t drink”, she interrupts with a reminding tone. 

He ignores her persistent denial and continues, “Everything sounded like the tinkling of glass. I could taste everything around me, the floral fabric softener, the paraffin of the candle wax, the toastiness of warm bread, the flicker of the flame—“

“Oh, how silly! Who can taste the flicker of a flame?” His mother giggles, wiping her hands on her apron.  

“Everyone can taste the flicker of a flame. How could you not have tasted it before? If you can smell it, you can taste it! Anyway, the flavor of the butter stood out. Even though the rice swam in it, you could still bite through each al dente grain. It didn’t cause the calamari to lose its’ crispy texture. Everything was a mix of lemony, aromatic, seafoody, herby, crumbly goodness. We didn’t taste this for a while….” He drifts off. 

“Yes, it must have been in the States that we last had such flavors tinge our taste buds,” his mother says, trying to imagine his breath of life in the ghosts of dead memories. 

“No, it must have been in Milan. The linen, the windows, the watery tinkling of glasses jingling and the simple yet profound taste of everything…” He says, jumping off the stool and grabbing a banana from the counter. “Anyway, I’ll probably dream of fried cucumbers tomorrow or something.”

“So, you think you dreamt this dream because we were talking about the tomato vine outside last night?” The worked up mother questions, hoping to catch a pattern in his thoughts and somehow save his life. 

“No. I think it has more to do with the argument about which breading is best for a crispier coating of a fried something,” he responds. 

“Haha! How interesting and how fun! Maybe our talks and your dreams will turn you into a chef one day,” she says.  

He stares at the back of her head, at her thinning greasy blonde hair with the curled streaks of dark silver that seems to be more inconsolable around evening time than they are in the mornings. 

Should I tell her?  He wonders. 

“Should you tell whom, what?” she asks. 

He doesn’t realize that he says it out loud. His mother doesn’t turn towards him, but he can see from her lamp-lit reflection against the window that she is, again, intrigued, worried, distraught, torn between being his friend, his Goddess and his mother. 

“That love is terrifying. Just that. But don’t worry, I don’t mean it in a scary way. Not in the colossal way that fact actually is… You know? Not in a sick ‘we are wasting our money on his therapy’ kind of way. Just in a way that…. like, there’s no vaccine to suppress it. It smells like many delicate things, even like seafood coated with breadcrumbs –“

“And butter and candle flame?”

“Yeah and like mirrors and glasses, either empty or full of water inside them, or against their absorbent surface- “

“And like starchy rice with herbs-“

“But not without the butter. It must also be lemony for it to be the same as what I described-“

“Of love being terrifying?”

“Absolutely terrifying, Mom. So very, very scary as Ffffffff-“

“Don’t curse.”

“So, like, take it as it is and suppress it?”

“Like a vaccine would.”

“Yes, like that. Not sure if that’s a good thing though. What are you cooking?”

She takes a blue box of frozen something from the fridge and waves it too fast for him to catch the label. 

“Calamari with the best breadcrumbs in the world!” She says with a melting smile that reminds him of cheese fondue in a ceramic-coated iron pot.    

He rolls his eyes and flashes her the dimple he genetically shares with his dad. He jumps off the kitchen counter to kiss her on her cheek. 

He says he’ll be going out for dinner and asks if it’s fine. 

She lies and says it’s fine. She worries he will never come back but doesn’t say anything. It’s fine that he is leaving when she clearly is making dinner. It’s fine that she is accustomed to burning the things she hears at the bottom of her Teflon pan, hoping that they’d lose all their nutrients and active digestive enzymes. 

Because if she says anything else – even if it’s something as simple as “IT’S NOT FINE!” – he might break, he might crumble off from whatever he is coating, like the buttery breadcrumbs on the bottom of a shiny white plate. 

When he leaves, she pours herself a cold glass of white.

She imagines herself in his dream, warding off any omens. 

Then she sits down, holding her head between her hands. 

She wonders how much more love can she handle? 

How can she simultaneously hate this so much? 

Why can’t they afford a cook? 

Why did a conversation prompt him to dream last night? 

How much more of what she’ll say will determine what he sees behind the cage of his closed eyelids? 

Will it all be better if she shuts her mouth, for good? 

And, finally, she wonders if this is darkness. 

Or if it is blinding light that burst through so much darkness that it found itself on the other end of it: 

Like when you love someone so much, you take yourself right through them.

You take yourself right through them until you find yourself standing outside of them again. 

Beisan A. Alshafei

April 24th, 2021