A THING by HAZELLE LERUM
Two Egg Breakfast
And your sleeve attaches itself to the syrup stain on the formica, leaving a ghost of acrylic microfibers, the hot chocolate foaming over itself and becoming repulsive. Everything is sticky. Syrup on the fries. The home fries, the cubey, salty potatoes, there is a ring of it on your coffee mug, the thick kind you can brain a dog with and dear god you are thinking of pouring it out and rubbing the whole restaurant down, cleansing it with its pungent acidity. But no, there is something sticking to the drink too, it’s one of those sugary seasonal creamers, and the orange juice BY GOD the orange juice—it’s like soda! The waitress has patches from where all the syrups and goos have snatched her bald, she’s ragged, she carts off to the back to impale your order on one of those old-fashioned spikes and falls into a web of flypaper, becomes mummified in a brown fruit-by-the-foot of fly corpses, and she’s wriggling and whining like a girl on the train tracks, a girl in a cheap bondage porno, half-assed, cheapest masturbating denominator, but you do nothing about it because what is the goddamn point. You must protect yourself from the sticky, which is probably invisibly licking its chops and just waiting for you to fall in. This entire diner is a Venus flytrap that’s waiting for you, idiot that you are, to wander in. Isn’t that great? Isn’t that special? Now eat your pancakes, your eggs, your sausage, your home fries, forget about the way it’s binding your insides up like swallowing superglue, closing your tubes like there’s no cure. Honestly, the doctors will look at you and laugh. You will be so far from a cure that they won’t be able to help themselves but laugh. “This girl ate sticky stuff until she died,” they’ll say. “She ate pounds and pounds of it without stopping and now she expects us to be able to save her. How silly. How stupid.” So you run into the back, to file your complaint but also to save the waitress but you trip into the fly trap too and become entangled against her almost sexually, so close to this stranger so suddenly it is fitful and frightening and chaotic, and then it resolves into a kiss so unexpectedly familiar, so deep and inside one another, it’s like reaching into the dark of the cupboard and finding the spice jar you know is there. You reach into her and you know she is there.
Hazelle Lerum (she/her) is a writer and emergency manager from Portland, OR who once played the role of "Know-it-All #2" in her fourth-grade play. Her writing can be found in HORNS, HAD, HOAX, and some other places that follow that naming convention. You can get it straight from the horse's mouth at @hazellerachelle.