Came home, he had a steamy melty baked potato in a crispy leather jacket waiting for me. Set it down in front of me, goldyshiny butter nearby, waiting, watching, so presumptuous.
I ate it. With butter. Whole thing. Made him so happy.
He doesn’t know I vomited it into the toilet while he washed our dishes, trailing out the fun-size pack of skittles he thrust into my hands before dinner. Pale, phlegmy strands of sugars and bile and plasma splash on the seat. The smell is horrendous, a saccharine, pungent fume that plunges forcefully what’s left churning in my raisin-stomach. I clutch at my abdomen, holding it all together.
I could just break, you know. I didn’t come with directions, they figured it wasn’t too hard to assemble an upper-middle-class white girl in the US, so you know, fuck it. They were high, anyway. Things didn’t seem important. The broken places weren’t important. The duct-taped places weren’t important. The bruises where they clamped me while the glue set only “added character.”
Character in spades. Not much resilience. Only a shrinking.
Now my throat burns and my eyes hurt. My neck aches. Two fingers on my right hand are swollen and scented of wet decay.