Lesson

by
M.J. Iuppa 

     Near the end of June in the heat that's steamy and heavy with the perfume of earth and grass and trees, tent worms are busy--spinning, eating, birthing within their gauze-grey rooms. The tree branches in our back yard pull down in the weight of their making. The tents look like paper lanterns in need of lights. The worms disturb my mother. She can hear their mandibulars chewing on tender green leaves. She knows she has to do something to save her trees.
     She thinks fire is a solution, and calls me, a willing fourteen-year-old, to help her fashion newspaper torches on opened wire coat hangers. As we do this, she explains: "We'll take the yellow stepstool out back and place it under the branches, then you climb up the stepstool and stand on the seat. I'll light the torch and pass it to you. You stick the fire into the tents and that will be that, right?"
     I go along with my mother's plan, not imagining anything could go wrong. She speaks with such authority on how to do things that I don't question her.
     When I'm standing up on the stool's seat, she passes the flaming torch to me. I raise it up over my head into the branches, and suddenly it starts to break apart in red-hot clumps, landing on my outstretched forearms. The smell of singed hair rank, the heat sharp as pinpricks, I start flailing and howling. My mother stands below, transfixed. She can't move or talk. I jump down, torch in hand, landing on the grass. Ashes falling everywhere. I look up at my mother looking at me, and hold out my arm. "I'm burned. This is really stupid. I trusted you." My mother looks me over carefully and says I'll be all right, but adds, "Don't trust anyone, not even your mother."

M.J. Iuppa lives on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. She is Writer-in-Residence at St. John Fisher College. Her creative non-ficition appears in In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal, edited by Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones for W.W. Norton, and is forthcoming in Chelsea. She was named Part-time Teacher of the Year at St. John Fisher College, and has just finished her thesis.