Hot Pot Magazine

By Jennifer Dickinson

I glue my eyes to the cover of the magazine, to Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain’s faces.
“Ain’t Love Grand.”

I know nothing about love. I’ve never kissed a boy or ridden a roller coaster. Never even
driven a car. My mother says it’s just one more way I could die.

Mom was the kind of girl she doesn’t want me to be, she made the mistake of making me
with a bad man, which is why my curfew is nine, and I’m never allowed to go places by myself.
Mom is worried I’m going to leave her, that she’ll be left alone with Grandma, stuck in her
mansion with white wall-to-wall carpeting in every room and a Pekingese named Perry who dots
all that white with yellow.

My ears sting. They won’t stop. I know mom will freak if she finds out Alison pierced
my ears. I hide my ears, which is easy, because I have so much hair. My mother’s hair — she
painted a portrait of me once in utero, a tiny baby with long thick black curls.

“You’re seventeen. Not twelve. You should have pierced ears,” Alison said as she pushed
the needle through my earlobe.

My mother whispers, a puff of warmth in my deceitful ear: “This is our last Christmas
here, Lisa.”

She says this every year. And every year we decorate the tree in Grandma’s living room
on Christmas eve and Mother’s hands are glittery and I know we’ll never go. There’s bourbon on
her breath when she exhales. My hand trembles. This will be a bad Christmas.

Bad Christmases start slowly. Mom will wake up late. She’ll complain Grandma put too
many dates in the persimmon fruitcake and if the ingredients aren’t organic, she’ll dump the cake
in the trash. Mom will drink too much and go on about how Grandma ruined her life by allowing
her to get an Art degree and now there’s no chance Mom will make more than minimum wage.
If it’s really bad, Mom will push Grandma and Grandma will fall. I will almost call the
cops. While Mom drinks in the backyard, Grandma will turn on the television and watch Regis.

I’ll scrub my rabbit’s cage until it sparkles. I won’t cry.

“She’s such a fucking monster,” Mom says in her bourbony-honey breath.

Grandma isn’t the monster.

I realize what Alison has done to me is the first secret I’ve ever had from my mother.

There’s a streak inside of me, I would describe it as a gold streak, and it runs through me, words
on repeat, a song in my head: “She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know.”

My ears sting. I’m glad I let Alison pierce them. The pain makes me smile, the way Kurt
Cobain smiles on the cover of my magazine. Like he knows my secret. My grandma will never
kick us out. My mom won’t ever leave. But I will. This isn’t my mother’s last Christmas here,
but it’s mine.

Jennifer Dickinson has fiction previously published in Beloit Fiction Journal, The Florida Review, Blackbird, Juked, JMMW, Maudlin House, Isele Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Hedgebrook residency and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her middle grade debut novel is forthcoming Winter 2025. She is a book coach and lives in Los Angeles.