Submissions for the Creative Non-Fiction category are open to one work of creative nonfiction completed for coursework in the last calendar year. Submissions should not exceed 20 pages. August McKernan wrote the 2nd place submission in the Creative Nonfiction Category for the 2018 President’s Writing Awards.
Jelly Donuts
Some facts we can all agree on. My mother was doing drugs again. My father was fucking angry. And jelly donuts suck.
Five-year-old me wasn’t aware of any of this. All I wanted was something else for breakfast. Hostess donuts sat on the counter, sugar coated and raspberry filled. Mikey, my two-year-old half-brother, munched away in the corner. Cooperation personified. Kacey, my newborn half-sister, only drank formula and was therefore exempt. It was me who messed it all up.
Mom wanted me to eat one. I had other ideas. Gaunt cheeked, and trying to hide her ache for another hit, she had a hard time convincing me. Round and round we went, until my dad walked in. Hands wrapped around the Hostess box, he told me it was okay to eat something else. But mom wanted to prove a point. Turns out, they weren’t really fighting about jelly donuts.
My dad worked at Travel Centers of America. As a result, his hands were stained with oil, calloused, and calm—usually. But that day, they gripped the donut box tightly, crushing everything inside.
The memory is hazy, but I know they end up screaming. Out of control. And in a fit of anger, dad threw the box against the wall, almost hitting Mikey. Mom grows irate. She would say that my dad was trying to hit Mikey with the box. He would say that he hadn’t seen Mikey standing there. I would say families shouldn’t dissolve over jelly donuts.
I didn’t see my mother for years after that.
The Spring of my sixth year, I sat outside in the outfield one day during lunch. Far off from my peers, I could reflect on not having a mother on Mother’s Day. But even then, I knew what I was doing was pathetic, and spineless. I didn’t need a mother. I didn’t need one at all. So I stood up, brushed the bright green grass from my skirt, and went to play foursquare with my friends.
Our reunion came when I was 10-years-old. Though her inconsistent calls and letters had kept a thin thread of connection between the two of us, nothing could have prepared me for the way I felt when she first hugged me. An envelopment of safety I’d forgotten to miss.
After the 11 hour drive from Boise, Idaho to Cheyenne, Wyoming, my dad and I were beat. It was late at night, and my mother’s two-bedroom house was going to be a tight fit for my mom, dad, sister, brother, and me. The kids would sleep in the living room, my dad in their bedroom, and my mother and I were going to bunk together for the night.
She smelled how moms are supposed to smell. Fresh, like the smell of freshly folded laundry, with an undercurrent of home. Before we went to sleep, she told me how sorry she was—for that day, for the years in between, for everything. It was a start.
The words themselves didn’t matter so much. I had heard them before, over the phone, in letters, in cards. It was her hand stroking my hair as I fell asleep. The rhythm that drew me to sleep. That let me dream.
It seems as though I’ve been tracing these memories forever. Tracing and retracing these thin moments over and over, carving an indentation into my mind. An ever present ache.
Just like the ache of my breasts when I was 15-years-old. At this tender age, I was already wearing a size DDD bra. My chest was sore from holding the heft of my breasts at the end of almost every day.
Another trip to Wyoming. This time on my own. Now that I was older, I felt able to appreciate Wyoming’s beauty. The second least densely populated state in America, Wyoming had a lot of space to offer. Sloping mountains framed Cheyenne, peak after peak curved inward in an almost protective slump. The air was clear and cold and still.
Mom was amazed at how much I’d grown, and that I was taller than her now. She appraised me silently, a mother’s love in her eyes. This kind of attention embarrassed me, as it does most 15-year-olds. It did even more when she noticed my chest. Bigger chests run in our family, she said. Now we know you’re really one of us.
She thought my bra straps weren’t tight enough, and offered to adjust them for me. And reaching down the back of my shirt, she did. Now everything was in its place.
“Now, doesn’t that feel better?”
It did. From jelly donuts to here—it really did.