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Click "recent" to return to the index of recent work. Home Cure by Marilyn Johnston © 2003Portland Review Literary Journal With smoke-squint eye and work-roughened fingers, he bows over me in pure silent attention carefully tying the short white thread around the wart sprouted on the base of my elbow, cutting below the knot, then deftly charring two loose ends with a match flame . . . Wear it three days, he intones. I wear it three months, to and from school, like a secret badge marking me cured, long after the dirty gray thread ravels away and the wart stays-- How he ministered to me with his hopes and desperately arcane promises: chicken noodle soup for flu, vitreous caster oil for constipation, scarlet splash of Mercurochrome for lesions. Poison ivy: paste of yellow glyceride soap. Counseled remedies for Monday morning hangovers: hair of the dog that bit you. Misery, of any kind or degree: his warm hand covering half my face, but nothing-- nothing for the child's long ache watching him fade each week to a cornered slump, numbing deeply hidden hurts with a private medicine. --for my father