Eugene
by Linnea Wiggers
After Sufjan Stevens
Elijah cooks lemon pasta for dinner. It is something he does whenever he is feeling melancholic. The lemons he uses are small and too firm, their skin as bumpy as the stubble on Elijah’s cheek. His apartment on Canal Street is tiny, but Elijah isn’t bothered by it, not when the buttery smell of citrus and summer suffuses the air that much quicker. It’s a smell Elijah knows well, one from back home in California. All it takes is the bright, sour scent of lemon and he’s four again, in the backyard, his small hand stretching toward one of the fruits hanging from the lemon tree.
The lemon is the yellow of the duckling in his favourite picture book. He thinks this as he reaches, stretching up, up, up on his little-kid toes. He can’t quite reach the lemon, his fingers hovering just underneath its pock-marked skin. He jumps up and knocks the fruit into motion; the sun startles, flashing its marigold rays wildly across the lemon’s waxy surface. Impatience begins to gather beneath Elijah’s skin like a summer storm, when he feels hands on his waist, lifting him up as easily as if he were a parcel on the doormat.
He turns his head and recognizes his stepfather’s face, his warm blue eyes, his craggy skin like a lemon, his smiling mouth. Eugene.
“Go on,” he says, nodding to the lemon tree. Now the lemon is there, right in front of Elijah’s nose. He reaches out and tugs, and it comes away as easily as a ripe blackberry. The skin is textured and warm, and when he brings the lemon to his nose, it smells like summer.
“Can we make lemon pasta?” he asks, as his stepfather lowers him to the ground. It’s Elijah’s favourite. His stepfather takes his hand and leads him back to the house.
“We can make whatever we want.”
Now, whenever Elijah smells lemons, he remembers this moment. The golden air, his stepfather’s smile, the lemon, filling up his four-year-old hands like a perfect, tiny sun. He remembers the sudden weightlessness he felt when his stepfather picked him up. At four, he weighed nothing; now, his years tie him down, reinforcing the gravity that pulls at his limbs.
Elijah longs to be that age again, where nothing seems precious until it’s past. Where time moves languidly, and summer lasts a year. Where he is only four, and no one expects anything of him except innocent questions and baby-toothed smiles. Where his stepfather is holding his hand, reassuring and kind, like the sun on a cloudless day.
Eugene passed away two years ago today. Elijah was in an art class when he received the call from his sister. He’d been painting a self-portrait. He dropped the paintbrush when he received the news, and its paint-stained tip made a bright blue slash across the portrait as though a piece of the sky had folded open in painting-Elijah’s cheek.
He hadn’t seen Eugene in at least three years, but the grief still hit as heavily as if it had been Elijah who had died, not his stepfather. He made lemon pasta that night and remembered being four, the lemon tree, his stepfather’s strong hands. He cried while eating it, the salt in his tears masking the sweet-sour taste of lemon.
And now, tonight, Elijah is making lemon pasta again. He strains the linguini, and a cloud of steam billows up, little drops of moisture gathering on his cheeks like ladybugs, or tears. He pours in the lemon sauce and imagines it was made from the citrus he’d plucked from the tree in his backyard all those years ago, that same, perfect fruit like a jewel, or a child’s mind. And when he takes the first bite, it’s
not tears he tastes, but that quintessential lemon flavour, as bright as the sun and as strong as a stepfather’s love.
Linnea Wiggers is a writer from Vancouver Island, BC, whose short stories often center around imperfect characters in relatable situations. She has been a writer since she was 13 and entered her first writing competition (the 2019 Island Short Fiction Contest, in which she received an Honorable Mention). Since then, Linnea has won 3rd place in the same contest, has had a story featured in the Stories Less Spoken podcast, and has placed multiple times in the Canadian Legion’s Youth Remembrance Day Contest. Linnea also had the privilege of attending the 2022 Young Writers Workshop in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where she was able to build her writing skills, not to mention incredible friendships with other young writers. Other than writing, Linnea loves to read, play piano and tell her cat Nessie how cute she is.