Back Then

On Sundays we ate at the taco truck in the Von’s parking lot, took the free tortilla chips and put them over our eyes like spa cucumbers. “I need my beauty rest,” we said.
Cherries hung from our ears like rubies, and raspberries stuck to our fingertips, making us monsters until we ate them off again. An orange wedge was a boxer’s mouth guard. Puffed rice cereal pressed against eyeteeth stood in for fangs.
“You do it,” we said to the grown-ups, our mothers and fathers and siblings and cousins, home from work or new marriages or college or war. And some of them would. They’d hold an Oreo like a monocle in the socket of their eye, but soon enough they’d let it fall and let us eat it, because we were always hungry for something they had touched.