A bolt of lightning flashes inside your body, tingling even the bed of skin under your fingernails. This is a new feeling for you: too quiet to be anger but much louder than pain. You’re a teapot left on the burner well past the screaming.

“No, he’ll be alright, Toni,” Dad tells your Mom.

Alright. Dad says you’ll be alright. No. No, Dad says you are fat.

Dad says you will have a heart attack if you keep eating like that.

Dad says it isn’t any of your damn business whether or not he smokes, to get your ass up off the couch and go play outside, for you to worry about your own self before you start telling people how to live their lives.

Eyes averted to the saucepan, Mom is in the corner bowing before her domestic altar.

“Eat your salad, honey,” she says. She adds three drops of salty tears to the boiling water, just so the macaroni noodles won’t stick together.

Sweat drips off your nose and onto the rusty brown pillows nestled in the bed of green. You can eat these. Mom says these croutons are low fat. She wants you to be healthy. She wants you to be around so you can take care of her when MS steals her bladder at forty-nine.

There’s a roar of thunder churning in your guts. You’re bubbling like that Diet Coke bottle after Mrs. Silvers force-fed it a sleeve of Mentos in science class. Your throat feels like the roll of sandpaper you used to smooth down your Pinewood Derby Racer for Cub Scouts.

“Eatshesaid.”

You’re consumed in fire bursting out from the inside. All you need is water. Water slurped from the bathroom sink would soothe your throat, if you could just excuse yourself—

But your Dad says, “No! Elbows off the table!”

You dig in, thinking only of running away. You forget how to chew. You forget how to slow down. It hurts like you’re trying to swallow a cocklebur. Your untrimmed fingernails carve into your neck. You are new to the concept of dying.

And then, you can’t breathe.

Gulp.

And then you can’t speak.

Gulp.

And then you can’t get up.

You should have never snuck those cheese slices from the refrigerator after they went to bed and never opened your mouth about your Dad’s bad habits and never opened your mouth to eat at all. Then you would’ve remembered that death has no respect for the young. 

In a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, flash. You break the sixth commandment. You are so light on your feet that your Dad will say, “Damn boy you shoulda been a quarterback” when it’s all over. You are running faster than death. It would be the last time you could outrun your mind.

Prepared to meet thy God, you dive into the warm, blue, Finding Nemo comforter on your soft three-quarter mattress. You suck in deep, so hard it’s painful, like breathing in knives. So hard, your organs seize inside.

You can take in air again. You wonder if this is how your first breath tasted, like the one you took when you almost drowned in your Aunt’s pool: chorine, nasal spray, the adhesive side of an envelope. You feel it cooling down your body from your raw, pink neck to your squirming toes.

And then, stillness.

You are confused. You outran death. You can’t get enough of the mothball and must-laden air.

That would be the last time your father would hug you. That would be the last time you would have dinner for a while. The spell will only break when your Mom lets you see her cry as she begs you to just eat something, please.

Though your parents would take you to the doctor, and then a counselor, and then a doctor again to try to find a diagnosis for a condition they don’t understand, even though they have it too, you’ll never get better. For years after, you will feel the same crouton buried deep in your body, next to your heart, where it will be for the rest of your life.

Jay Stringer is a recent English Literature graduate from Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. They look forward to attending the MFA Playwriting program at Hollins University during the summer of 2021. Currently they live in Richmond, Kentucky with their partner while working as a full-time cat-parent raising their child, Jellybean, whom they had out of wedlock. This is their first publication.