A THING by KHALID MITCHELL
Waffle House Ballad
You got mixed up again. Oh no! You thought you were at Waffle House, your flaky face baking in the horsefly lights overhead. You were craving those blueberry waffles. You like ‘em with maple syrup and a side of hash browns. Yum! Because somebody mentioned it to you earlier. Earlier? Not horsefly lights but strobe lights and sanitized beer curdling unprettily in your gut. Somebody with a cherry red jeweled purse—which you complimented—and matching cherry red acrylic nails—which you complimented—told you that you guys met at a Waffle House once. You shared a blueberry waffle because it was too big. Too big? But then you remembered. They sat across from you. You cut into the waffle and they started to laugh and you asked them why they’re laughing and they said that the way you cut your waffle is cute. Cute. And you remember those marble eyes, those cherry red nails drumming on the syrup-sticky table and those cherry red nails drawing circles into your back later. How much later? Later enough that you’re naked and they’re half naked and you’re vomiting. No, not vomiting. But you are on a bathroom floor. Not the Waffle House bathroom floor. Yuck! You’re vomiting something like—this was your first hookup since you broke up with your boyfriend in January and now it’s May. January where there’s snow and May where there’s just concrete and concrete. And you can’t tell where the concrete ends and where you begin. It’s all blurry because you’re moving too fast. Moving on. Ha! Isn’t it funny? Your boyfriend didn’t have cherry red nails like these. His hands were gravelly and big enough that if he cupped them together, you could fit right in there. He wanted to keep you a secret and you stayed because you thought you were precious and sacred enough to be kept. Like a wish or a promise. Promise being your prospective middle name if you were a girl, your mother told you. And now you basically are one, your father told you. But all your life you’ve kept promises. Collected them like coins and plunked them into your mouth and swallowed them down. You kept them until you didn’t. You were in his hands until you weren’t. You tumbled out. And didn’t everything come tumbling out with you? That day, bells rang, church-like. People are getting married, you said. Or somebody died, your friend told you. You never found out. After too many glasses of wine, everything in your friend’s apartment got blurry. You hallucinated snow and trees—the terrifyingly tree-looking ones with thick leaves and branches. You leaned through the space separating you and, with wine-stained teeth and a conspiratorial grin, told the truth that you were supposed to keep. It even got lodged in your throat for a second. It protested. It squirmed. And you hacked it up. Hacked it up all over your friend’s living room floor. New carpet. Was imported from Kenya. You know how much energy is expelled in a supernova? You know how you can only die once? That was you, dying. Dying on your friend’s living room floor and then dying with those cherry red nails ghosting over your spine and now dying in a place with stale air and more blur. Everything so blurry recently. Everything double. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. Like the truth. Like promises. You were told that you can’t be a girl and you didn’t like being a boy so you tried being a secret instead. And now you’re abandoned. Cherry red nails probably got tired of hearing about your boyfriend so you’re adrift under a black sky and black clouds and thin-limbed people and crinkled soda cans and sewer water and takeout bags and trees that look terrifyingly untree-like. You try to remember the grounding exercises that your therapist taught you. Hone in on the senses. What can you see? Hear? Taste? Smell? Feel? The sky, the clouds. The sky, the clouds. You reach your arms up. Your baby fingers flex against the smooth, nebulous plane of the too-late-in-the-night too-early-in-the-day sky. The pads of your fingers make contact. They adhere onto the clouds. You push up and try to tilt it.
Khalid Mitchell (he/him) is a black, queer writer from Charleston, SC. He's a 2024 Periplus Fellow and has work in Major 7th Magazine.