Very tired tonight. Okay if u don't stop by for dinner? Will call tomorrow. Love u <3

It started as a dare from Max who was technically my ex, but they came over every night to watch TV and bitch about our jobs. That's how we saw the video of the eating competition—guys as large as hatchbacks and other folks who were toothpick-slim stood in front of long tables and crammed cheeseburgers into their mouths with singular focus. There was something about it that was so gross and mesmerizing that I wouldn't let Max change the channel.

“Who'd ever want to do that,” they said, turning to me on the couch so they didn't have to see the screen.

“Huh,” I said, watching a woman who looked my age and was thin as a pair of chopsticks ripping cheeseburgers in quarters and stuffing them in her chipmunk cheeks. She chewed with a  ferocity I'd never seen. The competition was for some charity, I forget which one, but when that slim woman bested the other eaters, wiped her mouth on a napkin, and raised her arms in victory, I wanted to shake her hand and say Wow. What the fuck?

“I'd do it,” I said to Max. “But maybe not with cheeseburgers.”

“You would do something like that,” Max said with their usual measure of teasing, which is when I decided to research how people trained for competitive eating.

Max already thought my eating habits were strange. I'd become a vegetarian the year before Mom passed away. She didn't understand it, and I didn't either. One day all I could think about was how meat was animals, and that churned my stomach.

“Animals eat other animals,” Max reminded me. “That's the food chain.”

“Now I'm siding with the herbivores,” I said.

Max shrugged. “More pepperoni pizza for me.”

Mom sent me recipes for pork chops and pot roast until she passed away. I thought I'd stop hearing from her after that, it's usually what happens when someone dies, but around the time Max and I saw the cheeseburger eating competition, Mom took over my cell phone.

I don't know if old messages were re-sent, or if she'd sent messages that got clogged up for months in the cell lines until they decided to phantasmagorically ping my phone. Then again, she could have figured out how to possess my phone, since she knew I never answered calls but would text back.

What are u up to? Haven't heard from u in days. Cat has hairballs again. Trying new med. Love u

Since Mom died I hadn't been hungry during the day. I don't know what happened to my appetite, or why it became nocturnal cravings I could barely remember. In the morning I recalled going to the kitchen, but not what I ate. Just that I was eating, and eating, and couldn't get full. In the morning there were no boxes of cookies or crackers or cereal in the trash, which left me confused and empty.

Sale on chocolate chips at the grocery. Bought ten pounds. Want any? Can get more. Love u <3

Eating pizza and cookies and macaroni and cheese in rapid-fire fashion might have been appealing since I was bored with the cashier job at the grocery where I'd worked for four years. It wasn't awful. Many of my customers were nice, and my boss was a kind person who brought in brownies or cupcakes when we'd had a good quarter. She also stood over us to try to improve our checkout time by precious seconds. Her bosses in corporate told her that was important. How many nights did I come home stressed over the fact that people spent an average of twenty seconds longer in my line than they did in Tina's?

“You realize this is corporate bullshit, right?” Max said.

“Yeah,” I said, “but the way corporate treats those twenty seconds, you'd think our customers were dancing on hot coals in hell, not reading the magazine covers.”

“I find good recipes that way,” said Max, but they didn't have to sit in morning meetings and listen to our boss talk about our average checker speed versus the checker speed at other stores. Talk about a level of hell. 

I got a five-dollar gift card when someone put in a kind word about me at the customer service desk, but I didn't have much else going for me. Go to work. Get gently berated by my apologetic boss. Smile at cranky customers. Smile honestly at other customers. Have lunch and buy a never-ending cup of pop from the in-store deli. Go back to work. Take a bathroom break. Go home and watch TV with Max. Make cookies on the weekends for the soup kitchen down the block.

In four years at the coffee shop, Max had risen up the caffeinated ladder from barista to manager to person who worked in the back office overseeing inventory and promotions and making phone calls, and no longer having to wear a name badge and smile for tips (at least most days). They had the power to give people five-dollar coffee drinks for free. Talk about a job perk.

“You could apply for something else,” Max reminded me when we lazed on my couch.

“When I get home, the last thing I want to do is fill out a stupid form,” I said. “And what if another job turns out to be worse? At least my boss apologizes about harassing us.”

Max nodded and rested their arm around my shoulders. I leaned against them. I loved Max, but they were too honest to keep dating. They said they liked me a lot, but they didn't want to be with me forever. 

“I don't necessarily want to be with anyone forever,” they added. 

My parents had divorced when I was five, and Dad turned into an imaginary being who made child support checks materialize in Mom's checking account every other month. That was why I dreamed of having the I'll-love-you-forever permanence that other people seemed to find in relationships.

“My folks have been married for thirty-two years,” Max said, “but I don't think they've liked each other for twenty-nine of them.”

Neither of us were poster children for relationship stability, but I hoped I could find something close, which meant I needed to see other people and stop screwing around with Max. But after work I was too tired for dating, too tired for job applications, all the things I could put so much work into that might come to nothing. I loved making cookies because it seemed productive, but that was a routine I'd started with Mom that seemed to have no beginning and no end. Maybe training for competitive eating was attractive because it was one way I could get tangible results, or at least mocked on the evening news. I had a fairly low bar in terms of accomplishment. 

Making sugar cookies tonight. Cutouts if I have energy, drop cookies if I don't. Come over if u want to help or eat. Love u

I read enough online interviews of competitive eaters to figure out this was how you trained: Eat a lot of steamed cabbage. Drink a lot of water. Expand the size of your stomach so it could hold more food without making you throw up. Start an exercise routine. You'd gain weight after consuming an avalanche of calories in a competition, so you had to eat right the rest of the time, lots of fruits and veggies and whole grains. Don't do this if you have a history of heart disease. Consult a physician.

Maybe the last lines should have given me more pause, but I enjoyed feeling like an athlete. I'd always been the last kid picked in gym class when choosing teams. I was a slow runner and had no coordination, but I could handle the rhythm of walking. There was a park a block away from my apartment with a two-mile-long trail where people jogged with their dogs. I set a goal. The donut-eating competition in Cincinnati a month away. A benefit for a children's hospital. Pay thirty bucks and you were in. It wouldn't win me any humanitarian awards, but it was something.

Max thought I was crazy, and told me so in an appreciative way.

“I have to work that day,” they said, “but I'll be thinking about you. Here's a barf bag if you get sick.”

Mom thought I was crazy, and texted to let me know.

What the hell are u up to now? <3

We were still fighting in her texts, me versus Mom's visions for me. Part of me didn't mind that she wasn't around to see me eating mounds of steamed cabbage sprinkled with salt and pepper, and tell me that she was less-than-excited about the new hobby. 

I didn't know what to expect at the first competition. It was held in a school cafeteria, with rows of long white tables and the scent of cold pizza lingering in the air. A couple kids who went to the school had spent time in the children's hospital, which is why they were holding the fundraiser. The donuts had been donated by a local bakery, and they were selling more of them to people who hadn't paid the thirty-dollar fee to compete.

I'd barely eaten anything the day before, partly because I needed to save up extra calories, and partly because I was anxious. I showed the lady at the door my entry fee receipt and gave her a nervous smile, bowing my head. She smiled and handed me a paper number—23, the day of my birth. I felt a little better, but was happy to cling to anything I could consider a good omen. I pinned the number to my shirt, and sat down in a metal folding chair in the second row of tables. There must have been at least fifty contestants, which was fine since I had no illusions of winning. I wanted to be just another face in the gluttonous crowd, so I could let myself be a little excited at my performance. I'd dropped five pounds for the occasion. 

“We're having cinnamon sugar donuts,” said the lady who sat next to me. “Not as messy as powdered sugar ones, and they won't poke you in the back of the throat like pizza crust.”

I assumed this wasn't her first dive into demanding decadence, and made a note to ask her about that at the end of the competition. I felt my stomach flutter when green-shirted volunteers started bringing plates of donuts out and setting them in front of us. I had a dozen to start, and a plastic cup of water to wash everything down. I didn't really listen to the lady who explained the rules, but I'd read them online—we had ten minutes to eat, if we later expelled the donuts we'd be disqualified, and trash cans would be provided.

I had the paper sack Max had given me in the pocket of my jeans, also for luck. If I had a barf bag on my person, I figured there was less chance I'd need it.

When the judge blew her whistle, I attacked the plate of donuts with a singular focus I hadn't possessed since tenth grade when I tried (and failed) to win the school spelling bee. I was ripping and tearing and stuffing and chewing, feeling the ache of swallowing too-big mouthfuls which turned into a dull pain in my back, but that didn't stop me. I forgot about everything but the next mouthful, the next mouthful, taking tiny sips of water and trying to ignore the lady next to me, shutting out everything in the room but the next donut quarter and the next donut quarter and swallow, swallow, swallow, and somehow I finished all dozen donuts and another six appeared on the plate in front of me—I couldn't remember how that happened or what the person looked like who brought them out—but I kept ripping and chewing and the whistle sounded six years or five seconds after I'd first heard it. I'd eaten two and a half dozen donuts.

How could I feel so ill and triumphant, and better and worse when the lady next to me said she'd broken her personal record from the previous year eating three dozen plus seven more.

“The secret is not to think about the calories,” she told me cheerfully. “The body is quite an amazing thing, and will forgive you if you do this every so often.”

The winner was another slim woman who'd eaten four and a half dozen donuts. When accepting her prize, she said she credited her speed eating abilities to having four children under the age of ten. The second place winner was a guy two donuts shy of her, who had developed a technique dipping donuts in water to make them go down faster. That sounded a little too gross, even if sips of water did the same thing for me.

While everyone collected coats and purses and backpacks and shook hands, the lady next to me asked where I was from. I explained I'd driven four hours for the competition, and she asked if I'd like to have a diet ginger ale at her place before going home.

“It helps to settle my stomach after a competition,” she added.

I took her up on the ginger ale, and we walked six laps around the park near her house. Ivy said she'd started competitive eating five years ago, after her third miscarriage.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

She gave me a sad smile. “I know other folks who got into competitive eating after something traumatic. Like a death, or a job loss, or a bad breakup. Stuff that feels pretty crushing.”

I nodded. After having your world shoved off kilter, why not take control and throw your own curve ball, eat enough to feel so uncomfortable that you'd forget your other pain. Your body could only deal with one discomfort at a time. It might as well be something you created.

“I've found good people on the circuit,” Ivy added. “They're competitive, but they understand our kind of determination.”

Our kind of determination. I smiled. I was part of a group of people who wouldn't raise an eyebrow at my cabbage-eating regimen or the fact I was walking six miles a day. They wouldn't raise an eyebrow at much of anything. 

Achy today. Back and shoulder pain. How are u? Dinner Sunday?  Love u <3

When I had dinner with Mom I stayed the whole evening and we sewed mouse-shaped catnip toys for the humane society, using fabric scraps she got at work and catnip my aunt grew in her garden. On Thursday nights we baked cookies and cookies for the soup kitchen, and Mom drove them over on Friday morning since that was her day off. After she died I kept the small rhythm of cookie-baking which made me feel closer to her and miss her more. But my walks around the park waving to people and their dogs was a good break from that routine. A different goal. Sometimes as I walked I justified the new sport to her in my head:

I only do this once a month.

I've met very nice people.

It takes my mind off being sad.

She would have told me not to be sad, but to enroll in community college classes like she'd been bugging me to do forever. 

But I don't know what I want to do with the rest of my life.

It was good to know my mother well enough that I could carry on both sides of an argument even when she wasn't around.  

Do u still eat fish? That's not really meat, is it? Love u

At the store I knew cashiers like Martha, a grandmother type who'd worked there forever and gently told me it was a perfectly good job and my mother's ideas were a load of hooey, bless her soul. Martha loved being a cashier, saying hello to her regulars, and leaving work at work. Mom hadn't exactly pushed her dreams on me but she'd poked a lot, said I should have something with better pay and better health care. She sent those reminders more often after one of us had a bout with unexplained itching and allergies no doctor could diagnose. We'd stopped eating shellfish and berries and beans and milk and gluten and meat and eggs in turn, but nothing worked. Mom thought a better health care plan, a better allergist, insurance that would pay for some weird new-age cure, might do the trick. We didn't have much else to go on.

■■■

I told myself I wouldn't drive over five hours for a competition, but that was before my ten-hour trek to eat potato and cheese pierogies in St. Paul. I woke up at five in the morning to shower and make two thermoses of coffee and leave before six, driving straight through to find the Polish restaurant just before four in the afternoon and pin the number on my shirt. In the car I'd only had coffee and bananas so I was famished, but after eight minutes of potato pierogies I was positive I'd pop.

That was the moment when the marathon runner stamina came in, ignoring the pleas of my gut to stop eating as I told myself I wasn't going to drive twenty hours round-trip for anything less than forty pierogies. After the whistle blew on the twelve-minute mark, I'd downed fifty and my stomach was protesting. I rubbed it in a counter-clockwise motion to reassure my digestive system that everything would be fine. Breathing slow and deep, I felt my phone ping in my pocket. I figured it was Max or my dead mother asking how I was doing.

I ordered a diet ginger ale.

I'd planned on driving back that evening and dozing in my car at rest stops, but Patty, the lady who'd sat beside me in the competition and pounded fifty-two pierogies, said I could come home with her, crash on her couch, and drive back the next day.

“People let me do that all the time,” she said. “It's easy since we're never hungry for dinner. Or breakfast. Probably just some coffee in the morning.”

I said that would be lovely, and I might never eat again. We shook everyone's hand as we left the restaurant and gave each other gentle hugs, feeling the blessed camaraderie of surviving those few minutes of bliss and hell, together in nausea. 

I checked my messages in my car, and found the note from Max: 

Text me when you're done with the competition if you're not dead 

Just fine, did well I wrote back. I didn't explain that death had nothing to do with one's ability to text. Patty and I strolled around her neighborhood—everyone needed to walk after a good competition—when I felt another ping in my pocket. I knew it'd be my mother.

Just got off work. Getting a pizza. U and Max can come for dinner if u want. Love u <3

“How did you do?” Max said when I called them that evening. 

I reported my grand total of fifty pierogies, and that I might not eat for a week. 

“If we hadn't already broken up, this might be grounds to do so,” said Max. 

“Thanks,” I said. 

“You're something else,” said Max. “Drive safe, and I'll see you tomorrow, okay?”

“My ex-husband didn't understand it either,” Patty said when I hung up the phone, “but the marriage was on the rocks when I started doing this.”

Mom would have bawled me out, but that was okay because I was still mad at her sometimes, an emotion that came and went in waves of anger and other forms of grief. She'd hated going to the doctor, and for a couple weeks before she died she'd told me she was tired and achy and had weird underarm pain. Then she was gone. I'd wanted a warning. Red flashing lights, a trumpet fanfare, a drum solo, a loud and annoying electric guitar riff, not a quiet buzz on my phone from Mom's next-door neighbor in the apartment complex.

Labor Day sale was exhausting. Come over with Max if u want. Leftover macaroni and cheese in fridge. NO HAM. Don't know how u live on rabbit food. Love u <3

I was holding out for a relationship with someone who'd agree that we'd be together forever, even if we knew that might be a lie. I wanted someone who was my kind of liar. But many relationships are built on people having the same relationship with the truth—when to tell it, when to bend it, when to strategically hide it. 

I didn't like breaking up with Max. And it was the right thing to do.

I loved Max, but not in an I'm-going-to-be-with-you-forever kind of way. I couldn't explain why, but when Max brought up that reality, I was pissed. We'd just finished eating an entire box of gingersnaps, and I told them to leave. I didn't text or speak to them for a few weeks.

Are you okay? 

Let me know if you want to talk

I'm sorry if that was abrupt. I've been thinking about it for a while

Let me know if you want to talk 

I still care about you

Let me know if you want to talk

Nineteen days after the box of gingersnaps, I called Max and asked if they wanted to have pizza at my place. I'd pay.

“Sure,” they said.

They came over. We lounged on my couch. Ate the pizza. Watched a movie. Bitched about our jobs. Hugged and didn't kiss. They went home. I wasn't ready to talk about what our relationship would become, but I wanted to apologize without saying that they were right.

Not all love is forever. That doesn't mean it's a lesser form of love, but we hate admitting to its impermanence. At least I do. Love is one thing I'd prefer to lie about.

Max and I had been going out for a year, which is why I'd floated the idea of them moving in, which is why they gently said that they didn't want to be together forever. It wasn't a good time for me to hear those words. Mom had been gone for four months. I woke up aching at two in the morning when I realized I no longer had a mom, just a weird and spectral dad who lived in Arizona last I heard. I wanted something to be stable. Maybe Max didn't understand the depth of that ache, or maybe they did and knew it was best to explain the facts before I fell further into fantasy.

But after the pizza and before I hugged them good-bye, they sat on my couch and let me lean on their shoulder and close my eyes and do the kind of crying I sometimes did without tears.

Found a new recipe for gingersnaps. Want to try them  this weekend? Hi to Max. Love u

When I woke up at two in the morning and couldn't sleep, I padded to the kitchen for warm milk and graham crackers, but there was always something else on the kitchen table—a plate of cookies, or cupcakes with yellow icing. I never wondered why the cookies or cupcakes had appeared, just that I was hungry, so I started eating. The cookies and cupcakes were lemon-flavored, and while I'd never cared for lemon, I couldn't stop until everything was gone. Mom loved lemon cake and bars and cookies and herbal tea. I thought about that while I washed my sticky fingers and went back to bed, still empty. 

Trying recipe for stir-fry tonight but it has CHICKEN. If u want to come over I can take out some veggies before adding the CHICKEN. Let me know. Love u

When I started losing weight after Mom passed away I wondered if I was dying, too. At work my thoughts were invaded by things I shouldn't have been thinking about while trying to improve my checker speed. What kinds of genetic demons could be hiding in my blood, my bones, my muscles? Had Mom felt bad for a while before she mentioned her tiredness? Could we have stopped this from happening if she'd gone to the doctor, even though she never trusted them to have the right answer?

New hairball medicine not working for cat. Vet suggested grass? Cat will be eating rabbit food, too. Love u

I knew Max loved me because they were honest with me. They reminded me that when customers were real jerks, it wasn't my fault. Sometimes they brought me coffee when I had a lunch break. 

They didn't tell me I was whack for doing competitive eating when they saw I was serious and not serious about it. 

They reminded me there were many ways of being a good person in the world. Smiling at someone and telling them to have a good day and looking like you meant it was a start, because the world was short on sincerity. Too many people said “Have a nice day” in a tone that implied “Fuck you.” 

Max let me cry on them and didn't ask why I was crying.

“It's okay to be sad,” they said. Maybe they knew I'd be eating my sorrow at two in the morning for months. 

■■■

The plates of cookies and cupcakes reappeared in my kitchen nightly. Unlike in the eating competitions I ate slowly, methodically, what Mom told me to do when I was twelve and trying to lose weight. I was a chunky kid, and didn't understand why nothing wanted to stick to me now. My shoulder blades and elbows had become prominent.

“Maybe you're exercising too much?” Max said, but since I'd started that routine I didn't want to stop. It filled the space after work with something more than cookies and steamed cabbage, gave me the anticipation of the next drive, the next competition, the next chance to fill myself to bursting and keep going.

U still thinking about community college? They will be enrolling for fall until the end of next week. Love u

Mom worked at the fabric store for almost twenty-five years. She wanted me to have bigger dreams than being a clerk, but that gave me anxiety. One of my friends had gone to college out-of-state, changed majors three times, moved back home with her parents, and was bartending while she figured out what she wanted to do with her life. 

My cousin in Michigan was going to be a nurse, but in the third year of school decided she hated touching people, so she switched to the business college. My friend Lisa who sat beside me in math for three years dreamed of being an elementary school teacher until she did her methods classes and discovered she hated being in a classroom of third-graders. She was considering interior design. 

The idea of making a choice terrified me. Too easy to be wrong and forty thousand dollars in regrettable debt.

Trying new allergist this week. Lois suggested her. She does homeopathic cures, might be a quack, but my nose has been running since Saturday and fingers are puffy. Will let u know if she's too weird. Love u

Two years ago this lady who lived in my apartment complex, Jeannie, lost one of her kids in a car accident. She was ten, and riding her bike home from a friend's house two blocks away. It was dusk. There was a curve that was hard to see around, and a pickup truck driver who wasn't watching for kids. I saw Jeannie in the laundry room on Saturday mornings when we did the wash. After her daughter died, Mom and I made cookies for Jeannie and her two other daughters. I gave them to one of the girls when she answered the door to their apartment. After that, when I saw Jeannie I nodded to her and asked how she was doing. 

“Getting along,” she said, but she always looked sad, even two years after the fact.

After Mom died, I started to understand how grief played hell with everything. It had tides, ebbed and flowed.

“Are you eating enough?” Max asked me. I was eating all the goddamned time, but half of it was steamed vegetables. I worried over the small blue lines under my eyes, and drove to Milwaukee for the chocolate cake contest and Cleveland for grilled cheese and Louisville for cornbread.

Are u taking ur calcium supplements and antihistamines? Love u

I took cookies to Jeannie and her two daughters. She answered the door and I held out the plate and kind of smiled and wasn't sure what else to do.

I wanted to say, The sadness doesn't end, does it? It's like lemon. It's like the sea. You keep diving into it, driving into it, tasting it, and it never goes away. It rolls over your head and coats your tongue. Maybe sometimes it isn't all bad, but it always is.

Instead I said, “I made cookies for you. They're my mom's recipe.”

“We enjoyed the last ones. Thank you,” she said with a smile. For a moment her hands were touching the plate and my hands were touching the plate and across those nine inches were all the wordless emotions people only remembered when they were grieving, the emotions they didn’t want anyone else to understand, except to know the other’s pain was unknowable.

Are u getting enough iron? U look pale. Love u <3

When I kissed Max I'd had two beers. We'd watched a movie and ate sugar cookies. I was terribly lonely.

“Are you sure?” they said when I cuddled next to them. “I thought you didn't want to do stuff like this anymore.”

“I'm sure,” I said. “It's okay. Just tonight.” I might have been lying. I lied about a lot of things I didn't realize at the time, but I also wanted to kiss, take some else's shirt off, see the veins under their skin and drunkenly reflect on how veins were like rivers. I couldn't count on anything to stay still, I never could. The hard part was remembering and forgetting that all the time. What else was I supposed to do?

Taking cat toys to the Humane Society this weekend. They want some for an upcoming fundraiser. U finished any more? Tell me if u need more fabric. Love u

It was sudden. Mark, who worked nights in the grocery store's bakery, broke his leg and the doctors didn't know when he'd be able to come back. He'd been murmuring about retirement for weeks and this sealed things, but when I found out about the opening I went to my manager and asked for a transfer. As a reference I had Kate from the soup kitchen, who could testify that I'd made twenty dozen cookies in one weekend in my tiny apartment.

“Give me a week to learn the ropes,” I said. That would give Kyle, the assistant baker who'd been rapidly promoted, a chance to decide if we could work together. I only knew him as a specter in a black jacket who I saw leaving the store at nine in the morning with a bag of apples or potatoes. He might have been thirty, had a shaved head, biceps the size of coffee canisters, and a tattoo of a crossed spoon and fork. 

When the manager introduced me and explained the plan, Kyle looked at me with a squint and a shrug. The next night I started work. We hefted fifty-pound bags of flour, mixed dough in huge silver bowls, and proofed it on the counter. We washed the bowls and mixed sugar cookies, chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter, and chocolate mint chocolate chip. I dipped out ice cream scoops of batter while Kyle tended the ovens, taking racks of cookies out and sliding more in. 

When we'd finished the donut dough had proofed, so we rolled out thick sheets, cut donuts, fried donuts, coated them in chocolate and shook them in tubs of powdered sugar and piped in raspberry filling, our faces sticky by six in the morning.

I didn't tell Kyle about the day I ate two and a half dozen donuts in ten minutes.

The next night we shifted from baking cookies to cakes and cupcakes, but the donuts were the same. Kyle alternated nights. I came home, drooped on the couch, and slept until four in the afternoon. I lost my appetite for anything sweet, just wanted a baked potato, but I liked the job, the quiet rhythms, the beat of the mixers and beep of the oven, how routine gave me no time to think of anything else. After a weary week Kyle said okay, I could transfer permanently if I still wanted the job. I shook his hand, drove home, and fell onto the couch.

Sale on avocados. Making guacamole if u want some. Love u

Yes, I went to the fried peanut butter and banana sandwich eating competition in Memphis. It was brutal because the crusts poked the back of my throat and the sides of my cheeks, but I needed one more hard press to the finishing bell.  

Maybe this is too romantic, but there was something about eating past the point of discomfort that was helpful. Almost healing. I sat at those long rows of tables with other folks who'd found themselves in the sport based on a dare, or because someone told them not to do it. We were contrarians. It was sickening at times, but it was the illusion of control, defying something, mostly common sense and bodily urges. Winning wasn't the point. It was being with other people who needed to do something public and defiant and strange. We had different reasons, but maybe we all had something we needed to fill.

Do u have a pocketknife? I have one from Uncle Steve if u want it. Love u <3 

I'd never thought of myself as a night dweller, but I loved going to work at nine when the world was dark, and leaving as the sky blushed pink. I loved my early-morning grocery shopping, my early-morning walk, my early-morning meal with my ex-ex who they said they didn't understand me even more now. My world was an alternate reality that started to feel comfortable. I didn't know why. 

Don't know what to think of homeopathic allergy tablets. Can't read a damn thing on the label. Will let u know if they work. They'd better. Too damn expensive. Love u

I entered a new kind of grieving, ten in the morning lying in bed with my sleep mask, thinking about Mom, hugging my pillow. I didn't want to go to the kitchen and gorge on anything, but I knew I'd stop traveling to eating competitions. I managed an afternoon walk before I left for work, but when Patty called to tell me about the pizza eating competition in Chicago, I couldn't stand the thought of so much food. Was this progress? My phone had stopped pinging with texts. Was there nothing else Mom needed to say? Had we found the space where we were only repeating the same kind of worry and love?

■■■

Kyle was gruff sometimes, and said I had the same name as his first ex-wife. I wasn't sure if that was supposed to explain his attitude toward me or people in general, but I got used to his gestures and our wordless communications over the constant thrum of the mixers and ding of oven timers. Maybe I wouldn't do this forever, but now I needed exhaustion.

Max came over for dinner every other night to curl beside me on the couch and make coffee before I went to work. 

“You haven't driven off somewhere to stuff your face in weeks,” they told me after I'd been working at the bakery for two months. “Is something wrong?”

“Temporary retirement,” I said.   

“Good,” they said. “For a moment I thought you were becoming a reasonable person.”

I didn't know what Max meant when they said they loved me, but I figured it was the kind of love that would help me with rent if I needed it, that would bring over a pizza for dinner when we were too tired to cook, that would let me cry on their shoulder though it had been months since Mom died. It was the kind of love I supplied with donuts and cookies from work, and while Max said I wasn't good for their diet, they didn't refuse.

Teresa Milbrodt has published three short story collections: Instances of Head-Switching, Bearded Women: Stories, and Work Opportunities. She has also published a novel, The Patron Saint of Unattractive People, a flash fiction collection, Larissa Takes Flight: Stories, and the monograph Sexy Like Us: Disability, Humor, and Sexuality. She loves cats, long walks with her MP3 player, independently owned coffee shops, peanut butter frozen yogurt, and texting hearts in rainbow colors.

Visual Art
Sherry Shahan is a teal-haired septuagenarian who lives in a laid-back beach town in California. More than 100 pieces of her art have been published in magazines, newspapers, literary journals, and anthologies. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, taught a creative writing course for UCLA Extension for 10 years, and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize in Poetry and Best of the Net (art).


♡♡♡


Support Blanket Gravity

You can donate here to support future issues. Subscribe to our Substack to make a monthly or annual contribution. Thanks so much for your support.

Our online magazine offers literature and art with a focus on mental health or emotional life, always free to read for everyone.