As if in Hannah Höch’s 1919 photomontage Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany although it's Wisconsin and today

A sugar salt pie.

A as in an indefinite article referring to an unspecified noun. As in these sentences: An aunt is coming to dinner. Go make a dessert.

My fiancé and my rotund future father-in-law are watching Everybody Hates Raymond in a

beer- brown den. I'm in a filthy kitchen.

Episode after episode. Everybody Hates Raymond. Everybody Hates Raymond.

The words sugar, salt, and pie are from Middle English.

Interesting. Relevant. When they run out of Raymonds, they leave for Middle-earth to become The Lord(s) of the Rings.

My fiancé and future father-in-law mute the movie. They talk about the Auntie.

The Auntie.

The as in a definite article identifying a particular noun that's already known or understood from context.

Not by me.

I hear that the Auntie was a hairdresser, a cat groomer, made her own wig when she got sick.

The Auntie was in prison.

I learn that the Auntie used to live in new somewhere in an old house. New York? New Orleans? New Bedford or Berlin? New Zealand? They can't recall. Dozens of places don't sound right to them.

Caged in a kitchen with dough that doesn't feel right, I think jail bake.

Yeah, it's a trope. A fictional device when you can't come up with a plot or when you can and that's to champion the irrational, to confuse and even outrage. Food cannot be brought into a prison.

So, when my fiancé walks through the kitchen to the yellow bathroom, I whisper, "Want a file in the pie?" I wipe a knife on my pants for emphasis.

In the den, future father-in-law is wondering aloud how the Auntie will react when she sees him after all these years. To no one, he confesses, "Son, she's your birth mother."

My fiancé walks back through the kitchen. I don't tell him who birthed him because he doesn't look at me or say a word, didn't flush or wash his hands. He left the door open while he peed. The kitchen stinks of urine.

Then, things turn: the Auntie was a mermaid.

The old man suddenly remembers a photo of her posing in a bikini and heels. "Son, did you pack that picture when you moved me into the retirement home?"

"No, Dada. I kept it."

I decide on a pretzel pie crust.

"What a hottie!"

Pound, pound. Pound. Ping, ping, plink: salt crystals bouncing off my glasses.

My fiancé recalls meeting the Auntie once. Thinks of her often. Thinks of her as pink, frothy, spun cotton candy. "Wouldn't it be amazing if she's able to give us a little spin in heels?"

Barefoot, I crunch through pretzel salt. The kitchen floor is sticky. I appear in the doorway to the den and yell, "What the hell?"

That done, I return to the pie.

There's silence. Is The Lord of the Rings finally over? Thank God.

I can't see if my father-in-law is thumbing through the Bible for advice or if my fiancé is biting fingernails on an unwashed hand as he googles what to do with me. One or the other stomps across the den and grabs the kitchen door. Slam.

That meant to turn me into a pillar of salt?

Indefinite article again because there's no explanation. No "Don't use that tone with us.", "The Auntie is our empress.", "Don't ask one-word questions, particularly with an expletive.", "Get on with the pie."," Use lots of sugar."

The—definite article here because her fate is known even to me, an agnostic—pillar of salt was Lot's wife.

Disobedient.

But isn't it the men who are looking back at Sodom?

My fiancé isn't named Lot.

He doesn't have a wife. Yet.

He's Christopher and, as he'd point out, that's longer than Christ.

The Bible doesn't name her.

I'm Melissa.

BIO: Karen Walker draws and paints and writes in Ontario, Canada. Her recent work is in or forthcoming in Full House Literary, NUNUM, Weird Lit Magazine,Trash Cat Lit, Blink Ink, Switch, Turn and Work, and Temple in a City.