She’s just like her father. Half-baked by 10, fully cooked by noon along with the fried eggs and wheat pancakes. Honey bottle sitting upside down on the counter, she flips through but it’s not clear whether she’s digesting the book or the brunch. An English teacher once told her she cared too much about each sentence. The whole narrative was suffering. So she spent her 20s the way her dad spent his teens and his 60s (three very similar periods of change): smoking too much weed and spoiling a whole day. She liked rotten things and even added apple cider vinegar and lemon to her milk before contributing to the flour. Her dad, who would be illiterate in another life, used a blue BIC every day, writing Ws and Ls and dodging As in the gas station crossword puzzle. She suffered through her own small wins, like flipping a large pancake onto its other side in one smooth motion. Father and daughter looked absent in each activity they dotted their days with. Blank eyes and thoughtless smirks. A decade of life writing shitty sentences to further the full narrative. This pair are two who the world flings from its wingspan when room becomes scarce. They dwell in the earth and the dirt of it all. Smoking the grass and eating the wheat. Consuming and writing and looking and banking on the absence of others. She asks too many questions and he laughs at them — or mocks them, depending on the week, the strain, the difficulty of the puzzle, or the news story of the day blaring over them on the TV, sound waves wafting a buttery smell through the downstairs and reminding them to eat instead.
Have you breathed today? They ask each other.
One gulps.
The other chews.
Each toke.
Neither take from the vast and finite well of resources on this planet.
She thrifts. He buys the paper. Newspaper. Rolling paper.
I like wheat pancakes, he says after years of never remarking on the state of his pancakes. She, the picture of youth, the stately artifact of his matrilineage, smiles the smile they share. Mouth corners spread from apple to cheek and back.
Apple cider vinegar, she says. It makes buttermilk when you add it to plain milk.
Deepens the flavor, she doesn’t say. He doesn’t care much about the nuances — only the answer to the question he means to ask. And she was told by a townie high school English teacher that she was a bad writer, so she spent her 20s learning to cook instead, not realizing that the notes, thoughts, grievances, spirituals she spilled onto paper while butter sizzled or milk curdled were adding to the full narrative. She was told she focused too much on sentences, so she learned to read through them and find the questions the sentences wanted to be.
He was never told anything. He lived without consequence for fifty years until the consequences came traveling in neurons and muscle spasms and lost jobs and car crashes. And the bad luck never seemed to touch either of them. She was always told things and never seemed to listen.
I also put in some cocoa powder.
He groaned at this, recoiled, and set his fork down. She should’ve known better than anyone to not answer too many of those hidden questions.
I made something that is different from anything mom makes you or that you grew up eating and it’s different and it scares you because you founded this version of yourself on being consistent, unchanged. Well, change scares me, too, but you still liked this pancake when you first bit into it and you’ll like the next bite even more. Shut your eyes.
But their faces told no such story. Their eyes peered far. He brought the joint to his mouth with the hand he used to set down the fork . Her face stretched only into a smirk — its meaning hidden in the sentence between them.
Comments