Donna Vorreyer

Red Hot Sky

The air burned sharpest on clear sunny days, a bright heat in the nostrils as the Ferrara Pan Candy factory molded Red Hots and sailed that scent over yards and rooftops to sugar the sky. Those days, my father would stop at the factory store to buy brown paper bags secured with tape and stuffed with the spicy red dots. That smell a scarlet umbrella over summer sprinklers and bicycle rides, walks to school in the snow, which when it fell on Red Hot days, seemed to sear my out-stretched tongue despite the cold. An oxymoron of delight. A first hint of some dark metallic behind the sweet. The factory still stands across the street from the Catholic church, the steps to its rectory where my brother and I trudged to meet the priest at the door and make arrangements for my mother’s funeral, then my father’s, that red hot sky all around us. Not a sailor’s red whose poppied haze warns of storms, but a cinnamon glaze curtaining a childhood that is now a faraway country, a knowledge that the world serves up its honey with a sting, a scald that colors all that follows after.

Donna Vorreyer (Twitter: @djvorreyer) is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications, as well as eight chapbooks. Her work has appeared in Salamander, Baltimore Review, Tinderbox Poetry, Poet Lore, Sugar House Review, Waxwing, and other journals, and she serves as an associate editor for Rhino Poetry. Her favorite sweet is dark chocolate, but she’s also been known to steal all the Kit-Kats from any mix of mini candy bars.