Catherine Anderson

Toast Three Canadian quarters announce a gift from a ghost. Navigating the waters of solitude can be disastrous and require a television tuned to CBS, the channel my grandmother watched every Sunday night, before the ubiquity of porcelain crowns or recipes for natural dog biscuits, the latter she would never, in all of her expansive imagination, have imagined. She unclipped cloth earrings and set them aside in a candy dish as her sighs crested and broke. When she was young, my grandmother traveled between Ontario and Detroit without papers until she was caught with a roll of illegal ham wrapped in a blanket like a baby. Some dreams are seamless, swallowed whole as a glass of milk. Others sink and crack into bits, or become a cornfield middle, with wide-panned swatches and dropped horizon. I spend nights on my grandmother’s sofa until the end of summer when my father arrives to drive me home. He can’t stand up in her tight kitchen built into the eaves, so we move a card table to the living room for cube steak and Red Rose tea. My grandmother makes toast by sticking a fork in a slice of bread and floating it over a gas flame. The bread turns a fine brown tinge I have never, in all the rooms of my existence, been able to master.