Keziah - Cinnamon

“Could you pass the cinnamon, Keziah?” my stepmother

says from the tiled island where she stands in our new

kitchen. It is Saturday morning and we are baking muffins

together. Mostly I watch as she mixes the secret

ingredients in a stainless steel bowl. The sunrise

falls over another bowl of streusel that my hands have made.

It is light in color, blonde, my dad would say.

Blonde like the bleached, cropped hair that’s tucked

behind my stepmother’s—Anita’s—ears. I grasp

the plastic container of cinnamon and place it carefully

at her side, noticing the label as my fingers part.

Chinese Cinnamon, it reads in faded lettering,

cinnamomum aromaticum

beneath. I return to the kitchen table and mull

my restless fingers in the bowl of sugar crumbs.

It’s funny, but I know a little bit about

cinnamon. Once I did a science fair project,

something about mold prevention and applesauce,

and I did my homework. There are two types

of cinnamon: Ceylon cinnamon,

fine umber powder harvested from the bark

of an evergreen tree—true cinnamon,

people like to call it—and cassia, Chinese

cinnamon, the substitute, call it what

you will. My stepmother has the latter.

I wonder if she knows this, humming away

now at the kitchen sink. Does Chinese cinnamon,

cassia, have a place in this immaculate residence of stainless

steel and ivory? The grandfather clock

in the hallway, an artifact of my father’s previous marriage,

chimes its distant tones. Eight o’clock.

Does it remember another time when it used to wake

my mother, in her morning sickness? They would stay awake

together, my father with my mother, dreaming up

names to give me, the bun in the oven.

They finally settled on it while playing a game, drawing

every unwanted book from off the bookshelf,

flipping to the first names they saw. There

was an old Bible, paperback, tucked

in it the book of Job, locked in that

the name Keziah. Second daughter of the second

daughters of Job. The replacements for a string of suffering.

Keziah. Cassia. They are one and the same.

Cinnamon, the one thing my mother craved

like love during her pregnancy. Ironic, she thought,

when the name settled in her mind. I lean back

in the chair at the kitchen table in this reverie

till the front legs lift then slap back

to the linoleum in a sudden jolt. Anita glares.

“Don’t wake up the girls,” she says,

“Pass the streusel.” I comply, because muffins

are no good without a little cinnamon

and a lot of saccharine streusel on top. Yum.

I am Keziah. Cassia. The only daughter

of my father’s first marriage and yet the remnant

of years of suffering. I rarely see my mother

anymore, though she sees other men in another

city where she lives. Just like the book of Job,

you take the cards how they fall. I

was the first. The original sin, that sweet taste

of knowledge. But sometimes I don’t feel first.

I feel second, the second of seconds like Keziah

in the reality that should have happened first, the happy

ending. Ten minutes later the muffins

are out of the oven and Anita is smiling again

with that automatic expression that tells how

I haven’t given her enough credit yet.

I can hear the girls stirring in the next room.

The book of Job says that even Job’s

daughters were given their own inheritance. Laughter

coming through the doorway, blonde heads

following the scent of cinnamon in the air: this

is my inheritance. The spice and the sweetness.