chiffonade

April is older now and has both hands on her windowsill as she leans out into the warm and yellowish light. Her back is arched and from the street she looks like the figure on the bow of an old ship. April keeps an herb garden on the fire escape and now one hand has left the windowsill and is reaching for the basil. She is squinting because it is very bright outside. April likes to keep this window open and sometimes when she walks by she stops for a moment to close her eyes and breathe and try to untangle the lingering bouquet: rosemary, basil, thyme, oregano, parsley, mint, dill, sage, cilantro at one point, their scents all knotted up like yarn. April’s hair is short and the sun is warm and sad on her skin. Her weight moves to her waist as one hand reaches for the basil and she teeters on the edge of something huge, neither inside nor out, leaning so that her feet start to come up off the floor as her waist goes hard on the sill that cuts her in two. April is neither inside nor out and is leaning and reaches for the basil but is hot in the yellowish light and begins to feel very sad.

April is also nine and with her mother in the kitchen. Her feet are small and bare and speckled with grit and still tender from two trips over the mat by the door that opens to the garden. She watches closely. This is called a chiffonade, her mother says, as she pats the handful of basil leaves dry and stacks them, big to small, before carefully rolling the stack into a tight cylinder and rocking her knife down the bundle to shave off thin spirals. She tells April that basil is delicate—each cut will bruise and blacken the leaf, so she mustn’t mince it like she would with parsley. April is roughly eye level with the counter and has to strain and angle her chin up to see. April’s mother then shows April how to strip rosemary by pinching her thumb and index finger and running them down the woody stem against the growth of the leaves to form a neat pile on the cutting board. The cutting board is huge and glossy and looks a little like an old chess board with inch-wide squares that alternate light and dark. April’s mother tells April that this cutting board is special because it is nice to their knives. Most cutting boards have long fibers which run the length of the board and knives will cut into these fibers and leave score marks which dulls the blade. April’s mother tells her that their cutting board is special because the person who made it took a long slab of wood and cut it into little cubes and flipped each cube up on its end and glued all these little cross-sections together. She tells her that this means the fibers reach up out of the board instead of running its length and the knife can slip between them. The blade slips between the fibers without leaving score marks and the board can even heal itself over time. April doesn’t really understand. Her chin is resting on the counter and she’s looking past her mother now to the tulips in the jar by the window. April loves tulips. They haven’t wilted yet because her mother did the trick where she put a few ice cubes in the jar to keep them fresh. April still tells her mother everything. They both think cilantro tastes like soap.

Sometimes April is in college studying psychobiology. She is extremely bright and eager to understand how the brain works, but no one seems to know. April is annoyed. She takes a seminar on information theory and April’s professor tells the class that signaling means transmitting information through space and storage means transmitting information through time, but that really these are the same thing. She says that’s the funny thing about space and time. When we communicate, we shoot these little packets of information around and hope that they arrive just as they had left, that whoever receives them will know what we were trying to say. It’s obvious we need to take great care with these little packets. But storage is tricky in the same way. Things don’t just stay as they are. April’s professor loves to give anecdotes and reminisces about her cassette player and how she listened to one album so many times that the open hats lost their shimmer and the vocals soured and went breathless and warbly and eventually one summer she left the tape in her car on a really hot day and after that it all just sounded like it was playing underwater. She says this is because the player will always run the reel at the exact same speed and relies on the magnetized pattern on the mylar tape to stay in the exact same place but the tape stretched out in the heat and the timings all drifted apart. They drifted apart because the tape was passive and it’s all downhill for passive objects, she says. But now we know how to make a pattern last. We figured it out in the fifties. April writes something down in her college-ruled notebook and watches the ink diffuse slightly as it dries.

April is tipsy at a party and is talking loudly to a boy because the music is very loud. She tells the boy that every night before she goes to bed she fills out one page in her journal. She has been doing this for years. But sometimes when she goes back to read old entries, she doesn’t feel like she relates to the person who wrote them at all. It’s like each journal is a thick stack of Aprils who have been flattened and bound together but that each April is very different. They are all different people within one large coalition of Aprils. And the ink bleeds through because the pages are thin and there’s only so much space per page and over time whatever each April was trying to say gets harder and harder to understand. It’s like that game you play as a kid where you sit in a circle and take turns whispering something to your neighbor and everyone laughs at the end. Although it’s really not funny at all. April is practically shouting all of this because the music is so loud and also because she is tipsy. But her eyes are shining and she’s sort of smiling in a funny way where her lips aren’t quite touching as she waits for the boy to say something. The boy has paused and looks like he’s concentrating, like he has really truly paused and retreated to some mental place to focus and think. He hesitates then says why don’t you buy a journal with thicker pages or only write on one side? He wants to know. April lowers her chin so she’s looking up through her eyelashes at the boy and looks at him from somewhere far. In his stillness he is almost see-through. April raises her chin back up and smiles with the tip of her tongue visible between her teeth and makes a little humming noise and starts to play with his hair.

April is in Philadelphia outside the Mütter Museum with the boy. The sun is very bright but it’s cold and April can see her breath as she laughs. Sometimes he makes her so happy. Now April is inside the museum and looking at a small wooden box. The box has white slotted rails on either side with numbers counting up from one to ninety. Inside the box are forty-six microscope slides. Each slide has a little number written with a black marker in the corner and a brown cross-section of something that is very curvy underneath a thin piece of glass. The number in the corner matches the number on the rails. April is also seven and in her bed peeling wrapping paper off of a box because it is her birthday today. Happy birthday April. Inside the box is an ant farm. April in the museum thinks of the ant farm when she looks at the slides. Both April in the museum and April holding the ant farm wonder if it bothers the ants that their entire world is contained in a thin little slice of glass. If the ants even know. April reads the placard and learns that the brown squiggly patterns on the microscope slides are slices of Albert Einstein’s brain. She learns that on April 17th, 1955, Einstein was sent to the hospital with an aortic aneurysm but chose not to prolong his life and refused surgery and died the next morning. April never likes seeing her name this way. The placard says that when he died, someone opened up his head and took out his brain and preserved it in a jar and later diced it into little cubes and now forty-six cross-sections of the little cubes are on display. It doesn’t mention where the rest of them went. April is still thinking about ants when the boy comes up behind her and slips his arms soft around her waist and asks her what is in the box.

April is out of college and living with the boy now. They decided that he should move into her apartment because it was bigger and had more natural light and he liked how she kept a little herb garden on the fire escape. The boy doesn’t think he’s very good at cooking but wants to learn because he knows that it’s important to April and wants to make her happy. He gets her tulips and she plants him cilantro and teaches him to tell it from parsley. She shows him how to oil her cutting board and tells him how it is special because it is nice to her knives. She shows him how she sharpens her knives and carefully dries them before placing them back in their case. They were made in Japan and she keeps them very sharp. They are so sharp that they dull over time just from dampness in the air. April asks the boy to bring her some basil from the window. This is called a chiffonade, she tells him, and cuts the bundle into cross-sections more neatly than her mother ever could. Or ever will. April’s mother can’t practice her chiffonade anymore because one time April is at school and gets a call and her mother is dead from a stroke. It is all very unexpected. April doesn’t even get to say goodbye.

April is in her kitchen and has her cutting board on the counter and notices that when she presses down on one end to steady the board that the other side rocks up and now April and the boy are arguing about whose fault it is. This is unusual because they never fight. April specifically tells her friends that they never fight and draws out the word never to really emphasize the fact. April is telling the boy that she has had this cutting board for years without an issue and has even resurfaced it a few times by sanding down the top and re-oiling it to make it good as new. But now water must have gotten trapped in the fibers without being able to dry out and caused the board to warp and she isn’t sure if she will be able to make it good as new again. The cutting board has sentimental value and it is the boy’s fault that it is ruined. And the boy is saying that he hasn’t even used the cutting board recently because he is too scared to accidentally harm the board or do something exactly of this nature and upset April because he knows that the board is really important to her so it couldn’t possibly have been his fault because again he hasn’t been using it in the first place. He’s even scared to use her knives that were made in Japan and will often use the cheap paring knife they toss in the drawer next to the sink even for times that would clearly call for a gyuto or a nakiri or the nice paring knife which is called a petty. The boy knows these names because they are lettered neatly in gold on the foam block below the cutout that each knife is stored in even though he avoids using the knives themselves. April says well then the boy must have splashed water from the sink or somehow made a puddle on the counter and left her cutting board in the puddle and caused it to warp. They go back and forth until it is late and eventually the boy gets very still and says maybe we should just go to sleep and talk about it in the morning.

April is sitting on the floor reading some of the journal entries from after April met the boy. She uses thicker pages now and a lighter stroke pen so that the ink won’t bleed through but these entries are from before she made the switch and time and several moves have not been kind to the journal. During one of the moves it was raining as she hurriedly carried boxes from her mother’s old station wagon down the sidewalk and up the steps to her new apartment and some of her stuff got a little damp including this journal. The pages got damp which caused the ink to diffuse even further. This is because even though the page looks flat and uniform it’s actually a rough mat of fibers that are all tangled up. Normally ink is pulled into the space between the fibers but when the page is wet the gaps are already flooded and the dye molecules can move more freely. April knows a similar thing can happen in the brain because she read about it when her mother died and afterwards took her first biology class and kept learning about it all the way through college. April has always just wanted to understand. Her mother’s stroke caused her brain to swell up and the little pumps in her head to fail so signaling molecules began to pool in the space between the cells which triggered more flooding and the cells all started to die.

April is not reaching for the basil anymore. She is resting and sort of slumped with her chest on the hard slats of the fire escape and thinks it might be nice to just stay like this forever. A hornet is tapping on the glass above. The glass drives it crazy. Now April is looking down between the slats to the sidewalk below and sees a young mother with her daughter under a very yellow ginkgo tree. The mother is picking her daughter up and is holding her up to the tree so that she can pluck a leaf even though the sidewalk is covered with them. Covered with leaves from the tree.

April is also seven and laughing because her mother took her to the county fair and bought her a corn dog and they just got off the ride that spins you so fast that you become almost glued to the wall and your cheeks get really heavy like there are two little fish hooks in your cheeks and the ride is completely dark on the inside except for a strobe light and in between the flashes it’s so dark and hurtling that April can’t even tell if she exists anymore until the light comes back to limbs and hair and screaming and for a moment it all looks more real than anything—they get off the ride and April’s insides are still moving in a funny way and her mother is walking a little shakily but smiles at her and laughs and picks her up and April laughs and laughs and laughs.

April shimmies up and reaches and finally tears four leaves off the basil plant. She slides back down off the sill and walks to the kitchen and cuts up the basil while one hand braces her wobbly cutting board in a familiar way and tops the tomato soup that has been waiting on the counter. It has gone cold. She puts it back in the microwave and watches the light turn on as the bowl spins round and round. The basil starts to wilt. There is a cilantro plant in the trash.