Red Pepper Mother by Cheryl Pappas

Your bony shoulders, red pepper, tell me you’re ready to go wherever we take you—in our basket, in our fridge drawer, on the counter ready to be sliced wide open. 

I can almost see you putting on a coat, heading out the door, always offering your useful body, always holding in something especially dear, a certain sweetness that comes out only when you’ve been torn apart, underneath all your practical, responsible gestures. 

I think, red pepper, the best way to show you love is to let you roast so you can let go, at last, of all that skin, all those ripened seeds, so that you can be nothing but your sweet and succulent center, to lose everything you don’t need.

Artist’s Statement

One of the joys of writing flash is that it allows me to be a secret poet; things don't have to make literal sense. I also love writing in images. I want the reader to get just enough of the image in their mind to let them have it and create their own.

Cheryl Pappas is the author of the flash fiction collection The Clarity of Hunger (Word West Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Juked, The Chattahoochee Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. She teaches the online Hermit Crab Flash Workshop. She lives just outside Boston. 

For more information, please visit Cheryl’s website.

Purchase The Clarity of Hunger here.