Pickling

The old woman knocked out a Russian drone with a jar of pickled cucumber. No, a jar of picked tomatoes, some say.

Does this detail matter? Perhaps.

What happens is this: the old woman picks up the jar of pickles and opens her eight floor window in the draughty block of flats.

The drone whines below, a metal bird, a predator seeking its target. A few flakes of snow meander from the sky and settle on old woman’s gnarled hands, and on the lid of the jar.

She waits. She feels no fear.

The moment is but a fraction of a second; the moment is the length of this long war.

As she lets go of the heavy jar she thinks of all the work of growing and picking, of chopping and seasoning; the smell of vinegar and spices, the click of the lid, the writing of the label. She thinks of how fast spring turned to summer, and the sudden late winter of this war. She thinks of her children, and their children, and those yet unborn growing in the dark, and if the light will vanish from all their eyes.

A siren wails. In the distance, another explosion. The pickle jar appears suspended, like the drone, as if gravity itself were upended. Then there is a crack, a spinning, the drone tumbling to earth, the sound of it smashing on to the concrete below.

Tomorrow the block of flats may be gone, fallen to the ground like the drone but today the old woman feels only the warmth of her small triumph. 

 

by Bronwen Griffiths 

 

Half Sour Dill Pickles Image Used Under Creative Commons License From jwa.org