Jillian Clasky
REMOVALS
Fifty in a row and each cracks an egg into a bowl our shoulders can hardly reach, pairs it with flour and yeast and honey, kneads the dough with bare hands. I remember the cold, my fingers slick with the remains of a birth that would never be. I tried to pretend it was soap: clean as ice, stripping the dirt and grime and bacteria from my skin, making me new. But even after the ingredients were blended, after we rolled our dough into strands and braided them together, I felt the egg digging into the spaces under my nails, into the lines that latticed my palms. We glazed our challahs, strew them with sesame seeds, and let the teachers cart them away; we were too young and too many to operate the ovens. At the end of the day, they handed out our finished creations haphazardly. The challah I received but did not make was misshapen, the plaits all different widths, the seeds scattered in an uneven pattern. I never understood why the only blessing we’re commanded to say before each meal—the blessing Jews more conscientious than me recite three times a day—is the blessing over the bread, which is said to include, if not in its language then by extension, all other parts of the meal. As if bread alone could satiate, could imbue us with some sacred quality of wholeness; as if a meal without bread were incomplete, or at least not as soft to the touch. At eight years old I brought my challah home, placed it on the kitchen counter, and lathered furiously to wash my hands of the memory, but the soap turned into a cracked egg in my palms, gelatinous and impossible to hold. Still I watched it foam, let the suds leak down the drain; I pressed a damp finger to my wrist, felt a flutter of a pulse, felt myself turn cold, felt the blood in my veins coagulate; I swallowed the whole loaf at once to make it disappear.