The achingly red Roma tomatoes fill the bleached porcelain sink
like the bulbous detritus of summer. The remnants of seed and skin collide and float broken and hollow. The women work, cut, seed, and trim, with tanned and muscled hands: those of sewing, knitting; weeds that are pulled as if, like clumps of dry worn toe shoes, they only matter to the cloven.

The jars are erect and waiting next morning. The way they are lined up, shiny later in the bright afternoon sun speaks of and whispers to something unutterable and pitiful: loneliness, cancer, death, mourning.

But then, the wide-mouth jar rings are forever sealed smiling and satisfied in that red-tomato-juice kind of way; the way it will be like when you open the jar mid-winter in your white field with your wood pile having come down to a skeletal sculpting, a sweet, yet tangy smell will engulf you, not unlike the smell after sex, but it will remind you of the two women who wear their secrets in the blood-red bath.