Little Flame

My new cooker was delivered today, but I had to send it back. I needed a new cooker because the old one had little pictures of flames around the knobs for turning the gas up and down…

Emily was at my house making dinner. She put a pot on the cooker and left the gas way up on big flame. Things would always burn on big flame.
No, no, I said, you have to put it on little flame, otherwise it’ll burn.

Emily stood there looking at me and I remember the exact shade of her hair and the little pout she had on her lips. Then she was smiling and putting her arms around me. Little flame, she said. Oh, you are priceless.

It’s difficult to use a cooker that has pictures of little flames and you call them little flames, and you know this makes someone love you because it is innocent and you. In the end I couldn’t go near the damn thing. All I could see was the little flame and I could hear Emily saying, You are priceless, and holding on to me as though we were branded into each other.

When it came the new cooker didn’t have pictures of flames. It just had a zero for when the gas is off and a nine for when you want to burn things.