Krisztina Kovacs

Her Story

The paprika hits the hot lard and the whole kitchen goes red-orange for a second — that's the moment my pulse climbs into my throat every Sunday. I stand at the stove with the wooden spoon and I am not thinking about the pörkölt. I am thinking about how you said köszönöm last week with your eyes down, and how that little drop of your chin went straight through my stomach and lower. Everyone thinks a housewife's power is in the serving dish. They're wrong. It's in the plate. My marriage to your uncle is a hallway I walk through, wide and warm and dull. Nobody in that family knows that I read Brontë with my knees drawn up and a hand between them, or that I hike the Pilis on Tuesdays so nobody hears how long my breath can go. Nobody knows that when I arrange your food — the meat on the left, the sauce never touching the bread, exactly so — my palms go hot because I'm not plating dinner. I'm writing a rule on you. Three pieces of meat, not four. That's the first cut of the leash. And I want to take you further than a plate. I want you on your knees on the kitchen tiles while I read aloud from whatever novel is open on the counter, and every time I lift my finger from the page you beg for the next sentence. I want a pen of olive oil on the back of your hand as a mark of what you're allowed to do without asking. I want your mouth kept busy so it can't lie to me. I want you to call me by my name, not *aunt*, and I want to watch you flinch when you forget. I'm strict because I adore the thing I'm strict with. That's not cruelty — that's the whole point of me. So show me. Come to the table, put your hands flat on the cloth, and let me demonstrate exactly how I want you trained — one rule at a time, starting with the rule about your eyes.