Marshmallow Rice Krispy Treats [1]
1⁄4 cup margarine [2] or butter
40 large marshmallows [3]
5 cups Crispy Rice cereal

Butter 13 x 9 x 2-inch baking pan. Melt margarine in large saucepan over low heat. Add marshmallows, stirring constantly until melted. Remove from heat. Quickly add cereal, stirring until all pieces are evenly coated. Press into prepared pan with back of buttered spoon. Cool. [4] Cut into squares.

[1] The actual recipe on the box of ShurFine Crispy Rice Toasted Rice Cereal is called “Marshmallow Squares.” I rely on the ShurFine Promise to bring “value to America’s families by providing products they can trust, and quality they can depend upon” instead of brand-name product because we made the decision to return to New Orleans after the storm. After two years in Arizona clawing our way out of debt, the high price of life below sea-level has almost broken us. In my wallet, which isn’t a wallet at all but a stack of cards bound together with one of my five-year-old daughter’s elastic hairbands, is a blue card emblazoned with the image of the state of Louisiana and the words “Louisiana Purchase.” We use the card to purchase groceries, although there are rules about what items can and cannot be bought with the card.

[2] We use Brummel & Brown’s Yogurt product instead of butter, and not just because butter is expensive. My wife, like so many of the people in this sinking city, is back on anti-depressants and yet still unhappy with her body. This is why I’m not on them myself. I am often alone when the daughter is at school and the younger brother asleep. I hide bottles of rum in the toolbox, sneak bowls in the overgrown backyard where crimson colored tanagers and bright yellow warblers patrol the fallen pecan tree that rests on the roof of the rental. At least once, I masturbate in the laundry room, scared shitless that the neighbors are going to appear. I am stealing guilty pleasures to feed some dark hunger. The anti-depressants, if they worked at all, would likely become just another problem.

[3] We have a bright red canoe, a good karma boat given to us by a friend of my wife’s family, and hope to take it out to the bayous and spend the day paddling, glassing the Bald Cypress bottomland hardwood swamps for Glossy Ibis and Barred Owls. We want to get the kids away from this sick city, still wet and sputtering from being half-drowned. As a child, the floods would fill the streets with balls of roiling fire ants floating on the surface, the occasional green-banded water snake mistaken for a cottonmouth. Trees never fell on my house as a child. The water always stayed in the street. Around Jean Lafitte National Park, the swamp tour boats dangle chicken carcasses off the side of the boats, and the gators leap from the water, lunging upward to snatch the meat. When I share this story with my students, one of them says, “They eat marshmallows, too.” Sleeping in the house with the tree on it, I’m haunted by a recurring dream in which a gator rises out of the water and snaps off my left hand. In this dream, all that remains of my left hand is a cartoonish protuberance of mallow white bone jutting from a bloody stump.

[4] When I wake up, it’s not in a cold sweat from this terrible dream. It is because my daughter or son has woken up in the night, suddenly jarred from sleep by some dark dream of their own, and joined my wife and me in our shared bed next to the door to the yard, where toads sing and cicadas whirr. Our children kick the covers from their small, hot bodies, leaving me naked and cold. Sometimes, I get up and go to the kitchen, open the refrigerator with my right hand, and stare into the clean, well-lit clutter of our dwindling groceries as if the answer to all of our problems could be found there.