Fiction Fix Seventeen
New fiction by Eric Barnes, Elizabeth Genovise, B.P. Greenbaum, Melissa Hammond, Victor Robert Lee, Rory Meagher, Dianne Nelson Oberhansly, Penny Perkins, Carter Schwonke, Ben Shaberman, and Alice Thomsen.
New fiction by Eric Barnes, Elizabeth Genovise, B.P. Greenbaum, Melissa Hammond, Victor Robert Lee, Rory Meagher, Dianne Nelson Oberhansly, Penny Perkins, Carter Schwonke, Ben Shaberman, and Alice Thomsen.
- TAGS
- literature
- stories
- fiction
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Would You Still Love Me If I Chewed the Cud? 30<br />
into goo? I look down. Are they squishy and<br />
gooey? Not yet.<br />
And Mrs. Lorraine keeps bustling around<br />
left and right, and it’s hard to tell exactly<br />
through the grease, but every time she gets<br />
close, I feel scared that she is coming to fire<br />
up the oven and cook me. I mean, I can stick<br />
my hand in a candle, which is fun because<br />
then you can rub the wax around on your<br />
fingers, but this isn’t the same.<br />
And I keep thinking of how hard it’ll be to<br />
live life with my face melted off. It’s harder<br />
to find a mom and a dad if you are ugly or<br />
have glasses or smash plates when somebody<br />
takes the PlayStation controller away, so how<br />
hard would it be with your nose melted off?<br />
And so I start knocking on the greasy glass<br />
and saying, Let me out! But they go on kissing<br />
kissing squeezing giggling. So I push on the<br />
oven door, and it opens a tiny bit, but then<br />
slams right back shut.<br />
Travis yells, What the! and they turn<br />
around.<br />
What in the world? Mrs. Lorraine says<br />
when she opens up the oven and sees me here.<br />
And Travis starts screaming, What do you<br />
think you’re doing in there? How the hell—<br />
Get out!<br />
And Mrs. Lorraine just says, Oh my god<br />
oh my god.<br />
Travis uses his angry eyes on me and says,<br />
Where are you supposed to be right now?<br />
Children’s church, I say.<br />
What were you doing in the oven?<br />
But I don’t answer because there’s grease<br />
on my arm that I have to taste, and a little bit<br />
of blood is running down my knee to my sock.<br />
Travis takes a wet paper towel and wipes it off,<br />
and Lorraine gets a Band-Aid from a drawer.<br />
Get your ass to children’s church, he says.<br />
And if you ever tell Barbara you went inside<br />
an oven and could have died, she will be so<br />
upset I just don’t know…<br />
You don’t know what? I ask.<br />
I just don’t know if it will be too much<br />
to handle. If you’d be too much to handle<br />
anymore.<br />
I’ve had about infinity families. I think my<br />
first one was with my vagina-mamma, who<br />
was my only family that was black. But then<br />
on the day after she bought me all new clothes<br />
and filled up the fridge with lunch meat and
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