Saltine

How well its square fit my palm, my mouth, a toasty wafer slipped onto the sick tongue or into chicken soup, each crisp saltine a tile pierced with 13 holes in rows of 3 and 2, its edges perforated like a postage stamp, one of a shifting stack sealed in wax paper whose noisy opening always signaled snack, peanut butter or cheese thick inside Premiums, the closest we ever got to serving hors d’oeuvres: the redneck’s hardtack, the cracker’s cracker.