When I was ten, and misogynist and had a perpetual buzzcut, I loved to eat eggs—eggs of every sort, from David to scrambled to mushed in between apples, and so on. Further, I loved to eat dinner—dinner of every sort, from eggs to pizza to fruit, and so on. Back then, when the sun still shone and I was still at home, with my lovely family and shit, I held an especial adoration for family dinners—you know, the ones where you talk about the breeze, the world. My mother always, for these brilliant meals, cooked fucking fish and I don’t like it!!! Fish! Honestly, they will squirm in my bello and I shall not eat them—that’s what I told her, what I still tell her…Sometimes, also, she would cook (or bake? who knows? a chef!) a chicken or a turkey and then squeeze sauce onto it from a frosting squizzinator and then put on the table and I was like, uh, mommo, yo, I ain’t gonna eat that, look at that! You have mistook it for a birthday-cake of the yom huledet! Further, mommo, there is a winky feather attached to its bum, and what if it gets stuck running away from mine!—that’s what I told her, you know—was it paul rude? I mean, yeah, but whatever, it’s my bello, and I’m going to stay sovereign, like Woodrow Wilson said, like fucking any nationalist said—this is my body politicking! Ok so, we arrive at the dilemma, which is to say, the issue and problem of my life, which is: how to respond to the human question really, I mean it is eternal and round, which is “scooz moi, what to eat?” I would never eat for eatings sake, just as I reject that whole dumbbuttttttt art movement—I need purpose! I need, we might say, motive! I need tendrils and scribbled psalms!!! I love pizza; I fucking love pizza—I would eat pizza for every meal, if I weren’t lactose intolerant. And we butt down for dinner. And as we butt down to dinner—it is winter and cold, the kitchen lights and the chanuka lights and onions burning bright, the hollowness of the soul full of hollow oak—my mother seizes off her concerns into speech, as we all must, and asks: whaddya want to eat, CL? Quickly, I scan the room for a pen; then, quickly, I think of an answer: hi mom, so I usually eat eggs for breakfast—every kind of egg, you know—but maybe we allow the yolk to exceed its own birth-shell of ‘regular’ and I could have a hard-boiled bobbo tonight? My mom, who is an analytical thinker, thought and said, sure bebe CL, I’ll grab one from the fridge. O, she reached! And so she grabbed; and as she did, I was so excited, because I dug eggs like bones and I was hungry from a long day at school—she had sent me falooping chicken nuggets, breaded, for lunch!!!! Huh!! Moving on, she handed me a hard-boiled egg, with nuggets upon crumbs remnant on hand like porcelain pooped upon, and, yo, I peeled the shell off and dumped it in the sink, now full of egg-shell, and popped that egg whole right into my mouth. A brief anatomical lesson: esophagi have a limited radius! Eggs do, too! That telegraphed, let’s flash to the next scene: CL, breathless, a whole egg lodged in throat, speechless, arms flailing like drowning, scared! My eyes, which must have been buggin out, met my mom’s, my dad’s, and my two little brothers, and this was the life flashing before me. I remember focusing on the grapefuits sitting, plump, on the counter and thinking, yo I’ve got to live they need me I can’t die I cannot perish. And, lo, how I lived! My mother, who is an analytical thinker, well-trained in medicine and method, leapt to her feet and did that motherfucking ill-ass Heimlich on my bum and that egg did not, as one might predict of an egg, if one were statistical, squirm out; oh, no, it flew across the room, with a birth-like and pop, landing betwixt the grapefruit, so plump, still whole. And all I could say was yo, thanks mum, I owe you one.
Submit a Verbatim
Recent Posts
- A Yoga Ashram, Donna Tart’s The Secret History, and Discobitch’s C’est Beau la Bourgeoisie
- Balls Dropped: Full Design
- Letter from the editor
- New Year, New Me / I Was Cutting My Fingernails and Eavesdropping
- Sorry About the Air Conditioners Being Off: Townes Van Zandt, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Aesthetic Signatures of Heat