Our time back then was given to observe the ants disappearing into sidewalk-melted orange popsicles like Morse code, given for paint buckets and blue cleaning fluids stirred with a twig, the judicious addition of Jay feathers and pill bugs, our mad cries at the explosive fizz of vinegar and baking soda (a pie pan foaming like a horse’s exhaustion).
Flour and salt and water, shapes pressed into albino mud with thumbs. A tape recorder left running at night to pick up disembodied phrases like the pee-colored flypaper in the kitchen would tear flies from the air.
We performed most of our experiments in the mornings. The dissection of a dead frog with a razor blade. The attempt to raise a stillborn kitten from the dead. A Stonehenge engineering of rocks, mud-clots, and sticks.
Feverishly, we worked all our summers long, fitting side A’s into slot B’s, worked harder, faster, driven by the possibility of combination, of rainwater and finger blood, the click of interlocking atoms, new elements, light flaring, sulfur, crushed Kingsford charcoal, saltpeter, spit. We mixed the ingredients we could find in the kitchen and the basement, mixed, looked for a sudden new color like eyes finding us –
Tabasco, eggs, wasabi, baking powder, brown sugar, stirred trying to fulfill our self-chosen mission that felt like an assignment given by an assignor temporarily lost but ready to be invoked by the proper alignment of materials available in all our kitchens.