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We’re thrilled to introduce you to a brand-new chapter in The Alembic’s history. For the first time ever, we’re offering an audio edition of the journal—an exciting new endeavor for 2025. In this edition, you’ll hear every written piece read aloud by Providence College students, bringing a new dimension and life to the written word.
My mom isn’t from Baltimore, but her heart is and so is her crabcake
recipe. On Easter and her birthday the kitchen is filled with the famil-
iar smell and she cooks, humming James Taylor. I know if she could
she’d follow the trail and the smell and never look back.
We sit out back picking crabs, fingernails and cuts stinging with it. I
sit between my father’s sister and brother, none of us able to look each
other in the eyes longer than grief allows. Beer cans and jokes are
speckled red and spiced; the crickets and horses watch from the yard.
The girl I grew up with, once three houses down the street now at a
college seven hours south but one I know well; each of our favorite
memories sprinkled with it. She cooks me eggs and potatoes, dous-
ing them in my seasoned childhood, one I never imagined she would
understand. But she does now, and it pulls our knot to an impossible
tightness; it cannot be undone.
My mom’s college roommate makes us Bloody Marys along the inlet.
The drink is the name of this woman that binds us, as if the whole
thing was conspired by the little yellow and blue container with the
red pop-off top. I buzz with alcohol and tomato juice as the sun burns
my cheeks a matching crimson.
The small side with the holes or the wide opening so you can spoon
it out. Whichever I choose depends how much I want the nostalgia
and aching for this integral part of me to cake my lungs and blaze my
mouth. Smell tortures me with love, grief, times I can recreate but
never get back, all without the warning other senses allow.