Sugar

It is much too common a substance to go unnoticed, so I always make a point of acknowledging its presence right away before anyone else can detect it. I see it downtown: powdered, encrusting a meager bundle of dough containing hidden almonds in the bakery, slipping over the girl’s voice as she rings me up. Fingers damp from the sweat of a glass of water make the leftover deposits in the piece of wax paper I carry stick to my fingertips, and I forget as I run them through my hair. My mother notices as I walk through the door, quickly and gently brushing the sugar out of my bangs, my high cheekbones. She asks me to bake a batch of cookies. “For the meeting,” she says, though I have no recollection of one having been scheduled. Entering the kitchen, I find ingredients laid out for me; baking powder, chocolate baking chips, eggs, flour and it—glucose granules shrouded by coarse brown paper. I break two eggs in half, empty the contents into the bowl, then pick up the end of the bag neatly stamped “Dixie Crystals.” The top has been cut; my hands slip. Spilled crystals encrust the floor, stool and countertop, the divine substance meandering its way back into my hair. I sigh, slide down against the counter, and land in the soft, refined snow. Grains cling to my eyelashes, the collar of my shirt and fall into my shirt pocket. I lick the tip of my finger and dip it in the pocket, drawing it back to trace my bottom lip, drawing it in to feel the granules roll off my lip to my tongue. I think of the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, a trillion little monosaccaride chips on the roof of my mouth, woven through my hair like solidified pixie dust, in the beds of my nails, the folds of my skirt, even embedded in the cracked faux-brick linoleum. The texture reminds me of the time I was dragged by an immense wave across a plane of sand and seaweed at the beach, so that I found myself eating the ocean floor as it met my mouth. Now the sugar stings, but produces euphoria, enrapturing my senses in the equivalence of a mere third of a teaspoon.