I Don’t Need to Find a Mother of Vinegar, I Grew One Myself

I moved to LA and became the bearer of life. I built a Symbiotic Community of Bacteria and Yeasts, and all I did was purchase glass cruet bottles for olive oil and vinegar.

Over my sink red wine vinegar trickled down the clear, inside walls and began again. Vinegar is already alive, sure, but this one was reborn. Musty red, used when needed. Like a plant, sunshine and air gives it all it needs—allowing a scoby to be born almost biweekly. A thick fleshy layer built on top of the burgundy substance (increasingly swimming with strands that looked like blood vessels).

I was patient. I knew the longer I went without touching it, the more dense the scoby. I felt eager when I realized I hadn’t checked on it in a while—a watched pot never boils, but if you wait long enough bubbles will form anyways. I swished the bottle around like I was in a lab, seeing the square selection of skin spin around before finding the others. They built up. There really were over a dozen scoby in there—one every couple of weeks. I told my roommate it was almost unusable in terms of cooking, but I couldn’t pour them out because I liked to watch them grow. I moved to LA and as I grew everything around me began to too. New leaves curled up in small cones near the base of a bigger leaf. My book collection grew. The amount of “lightweight” jackets I had grew. And the bacteria between the narrow glass walls of my vinegar cruet grew; the sugar eaten alive, solidifying a substance into a lively, gelatinous square with rounded corners.

But one era ends and at midnight I titled the bottle over the sink and giggled at how easily they folded to fall out of the bottle’s bore, the throat of an inanimate object. They slipped around my sink, and I indulged in poking them. I imagined parts of my insides being a similar texture. And with that, I gathered them and threw them away. It was eerily easy to kill my child.