NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 3

[satyapriya]

She doesn’t cook,
or clean much.
She’s vegetarian,
like her mother, and grandmother,
and back a few more generations,
at least on the maternal line.
There are cousins as fat as cows,
meat-eaters who even suck
the marrow out of chicken bones.
No such thing as a dessert, or a chocolate
in her regimented diet.
No bread.
Raw vegan, heavy on the vegetables.
She doesn’t know why,
except that’s how her family is.
She heard something, once,
about ovens.
Their family is small,
so maybe there’s something there,
in their background,
about Auchwitz?
She doesn’t know,
and no one says.
She thinks that one day,
She’ll join Ancestry dot com
and find out.
She keeps that idea to herself,
in a cage,
occasionally testing it to see if it’s ready.
It never is.
Oh, and she hates her middle name, too.
So European, so peasant.
It sits there, in the centre,
like a damp wood on a cold night.
Gretel.
She wishes it was something lighter,
maybe something magical,
something sweet,
like a confection she could live in.
She eats a piece of fruit,
the only sugar to pass her lips.