Torula Yeast

Torula yeast, that’s what she like to put on her toast. Her mother told her that it would make her hair thicker and lips fuller, and stop the trembling in her legs. It never did, but she put it on her toast anyhow. She thought it funny that wives’ tales are always told by wives and that her mother never once said the word wife in the house. She just figured her mother didn’t care much for the word or hated saying it, or that she felt uneasy in the house, the house the dustbin men always passed by and the house where her father played cards with other wives’ husbands. Wives’ tales are like fairy tales, so she thought, a troubled beginning, a fight to the death in the middle, and a happy ending at the end. All she saw was the middle, never quite reading through to the end or knowing if there was an end to begin with. She put torula yeast on her morning toast, spreading it on evenly with a butter knife that never touched butter or a lick of jam.