Food for Thought
REBECCA SLOTKIN
I. Taste You
This taste that draws your eyes inside your mouth to watch the chocolate wrap around your gums and ooze through the cracks of your teeth and fill your mouth up to the underside of your tongue that feels the flavor of four hands on the mixing bowl and don’t pour too fast or, and a sprinkling of flour on a black t-shirt and a batter rimmed laugh sliding into the oven to bake the taste of our fingertips you lick and then smile me a midnight castle parapet because you bit into a rectangle of the sky which I can see from the windowsill where I sit and think of…chocolate.
II. Domestic Blitz
Sometimes, she would say, sometimes I want to slide along the porcelain lines of light and laugh amongst the cheerios. And why would you want to do a silly thing like that? He would say and move three around with the tip of his spoon. Because, she would sigh, because. And he would wonder what she meant and gaze deep into his porcelain bowl and wonder why they floated, those cheerios, in twos and threes and fives, and if they wouldn’t have been better off alone. Surely, surely, he would say, it would be better off if they didn’t clump like that. Why, she would frown, why? What do you have against the happiness of cheerios? And he would have no answer but that he always ate the clumps first. She would shrug and say he had his values all mixed up, and sometimes, sometimes, I wonder about you. He would fidget and scowl and say it’s too early in the morning to be arguing already and I don’t see why you always have to argue with everything I say, because sometimes, sometimes he would wonder about him too. And she would raise her voice to say that she wasn’t arguing all the time, goddamit, all she said was that she wanted to laugh amongst the cheerios, because she knew that she wanted to fight. It’s too early, it’s too early, he would mutter at his bowl, and she would say no, no, it’s too late. It’s too late. And in the sharp silence of metal scraping porcelain, they would dump their uneaten cheerios down the drain and leave the house for work.
III. Old Friends
Her face looks like oatmeal forgotten on the stovetop. Raisins for eyes, for nostrils, for ears, brown sugar flecks across the cheeks. Her skin catches the light and throws it back at me in clumps when we take our morning walk and the bouncing glare from her unfailingly white sneakers adds rhythm to the effect.
Sometimes, I find myself wanting to stroke her cheek to see if it has that same cool, damp give as oatmeal, but I remember that I look like the upside of an uncooked chicken breast and become ashamed. I have known her since before the oatmeal years, before the raisin years, before the brown sugar years, before the chicken skin years, before the years. Just as she has known me. We have taken this walk a thousand, thousand times.
We pass two old men and they look and nod and look away, and I want to yell in my quiet croak that our white wisps used to be golden locks and our alimentary skin used to stretch and glow, but she is oatmeal and I am chicken skin, and we walk on in silence to the next patch of shade. ■