Will you taste as good in death as you do in life? You say that’s up to you, isn’t it? After you’re cremated, you said, you don’t wish to be scattered, rather you want to be spooned into my daily morning espressos. I agree. Sugar ruins the bitter anyway. In Massachusetts you’re mandated to be burned in a coffin, so I’m already imagining pine, robin songs trapped, Costco-brand lacquer, the wood’s cheep eons commingled with your tattoos savory memory, the guttural romance of your unmentionables, every still-uncooked bone. This delectable grief should take years, you say. Revolting how we’re supposed to sit out eternity on a shrine, or bubble wrapped in an attic, or tossed to the wind like a common grandmother. No. Death, you say, must feed, nourish.…
I stood up on my pedals for the climb’s final push, motivated by visions of finally winning one of these local mountain bike races. Clenching my teeth, I leaned forward and stomped my foot down, only to hear the grating metallic snap of a broken chain. My feet spun aimlessly, I lost my balance, and I fell to the side of the trail – right into a Carhartt-clad, muscle-bound man, the guy everyone in town referred to as “Rasta.” He’d been posted alongside this steep hill with a first aid kit and a radio, assigned to call in the bib numbers of passing riders and to help with crises as they arose. I think the only crisis that day was mine. “Looks like you might could use some help,” he said, once I’d unclipped from my pedals and crawled out from under my bike.…
“I hear you,” I reply, holding the phone at a distance. Maya’s voice comes across the line at a higher decibel level than usual. “Are you sure you’re feeling contractions?”
“Daniel!” It is nearly a shout. “I know what this is and I know that you have to be on the next flight.”
“Alright,” I say, wondering if this isn’t another case of false labor, like the symptoms that sent us to the hospital prematurely just two weeks ago. “I will order my ticket for tonight.”
“I don’t know if I can last that long!”
It is early afternoon so there’s plenty of time to make a reservation. There is no doubt in my mind that there will be an empty seat on the plane.…
I watch as the crinkled, bright orange edge of a Reese’s candy bar slowly makes its mechanic descent before getting caught on one of the spiraled spokes on the way down. It hangs from D1, taunting me. I bang a fist against the glass of the vending machine, but the candy bar just swings lazily, happily. A child on a makeshift tree swing. Dammit. I give one final kick before turning away, sipping acerbic, cold coffee from a Styrofoam cup.
I have been here before. Not on this floor exactly, although the steely gray tiling and the white, cinder block walls accented with a single stripe of inexplicable pink along the molding is replicated throughout the entire hospital. My dad got me Junior Mints the first time I was here, Mike and Ike’s the second.…
Hunger will whimper in your chest until you know it’s there.
Beneath my wrists are the black horns of a ram. I clench, and they give for my fingers.
The horns are not horns but the drop handlebars of a bicycle. The smell of olive oil is really the musk of a garage. This was a dream distinctly American—
the horn of the harvest was full. I had everything I needed and my stomach only growled at strangers.
