Fix

all the halves into a plastic baggie and hide it. I’ll keep the ones in the bottles whole so my mother doesn’t find out.” The thought of all my Roxy neatly packaged in plastic and tucked away into a warm space makes me happy. It reminds me of myself.
“Watch what you’re doing,” she says.
I’ve cut the pill wrong and it crumbles.
“That’s okay,” I say, popping the crumbled pieces into my mouth. “I’m allowed to swallow these parts. That’s the rule.”
“There are rules?”
“Of course there are rules,” I say.
“Who makes them?”
I just smile, and she laughs. Because I make them. Although the need to follow them is strangely unaffected by this fact.
When I’m finished, I count the pill pieces. Twice.
“You do know that the amount is actually the same as before you cut them up?” she asks. “Don’t you?”
“I do.”
But I don’t.
Everything we think, everything we know, can change. There is no actual. No literal. No real.
This is the Roxy dust talking.
I count them one last time.
“I’m glad you’re not mad at me anymore, Lid,” I tell her.
“Why would I be mad at you?”
I pop a wobbly-looking half into my mouth instead of answering and enjoy the scrape of it as I swallow.
I love my Roxy.
Last night I googled how painkillers work. I wanted in on the chunky white pill’s journey, to know what happened to it after it passed my lips.
Our bodies are filled with nerve endings. When cells are injured or damaged, they release certain chemicals. When these chemicals hit the nerve endings, the nerve endings respond by whispering to one another—nerve to nerve to nerve—until the message reaches your brain: You are in pain, a lot of pain!
But then comes the Roxy.
Sometimes just staring at the bottle makes me happy. It’s like I feel dry without it. And I want to feel wet. I can’t explain it any better than that.
In fact, I can feel it already, doing the simple little job of wedging itself between the nerves so they can’t speak to one another.
No message. No pain.
Proving that it’s better not to know.
After hiding my pills in a secret place, I lie down on the couch. Where has Lidia gone? My laptop is sitting on the coffee table. I open Netflix. But the screen with all its colorful choices immediately defeats me, and I close it up and slide it to the floor.
I hate the middle of the day.
And now I hate that I cut up all my Roxy—it made me okay, doing something for a moment, but that translates into not okay in all the other moments.
I turn to face him—the Roxy bits and dust from my work now wedged in all the right places. The sun is shining off his aperture, aperture being a fancy name for the telescope’s front eye.
Aperture.
“Why are you a telescope?”
“Would you like me to be in some other form?” he asks.
“Some other form?” I say, letting my eyes flutter shut. “Like a giant plastic hamburger?” I need to rest. My apertures. Rest.
I’m almost gone, returning to the quiet, soft place where the Roxy takes me, when I hear him.
“What about the human form?”
Hmmm… so not a plastic hamburger?

The Happiest of Huts
Our first day of our first job
we found ourselves
in a smelly locker room
with two giant costumes.
I wanted to be the french fry,
with its spongy, yellow softness
and cool beret.
The hamburger
wore a goofy tuxedo
size Men’s XL, and
worse,
it had a huge plastic head.
Huge.
But the french fry had
two puffy yellow hands
built
right into the costume
and the hamburger wore black gloves and
used a cane.
I became the hamburger.
They sent us everywhere…
new-building openings,
food festivals, a
medieval fair.
We never spoke.
Food doesn’t speak.
We just showed up
and were a hit.
Everywhere.
Even at the medieval fair,
where we competed
with swords and pirate hats.
Lidia said
she loved the
paychecks,
although it was obvious
every time she removed the french fry head—
her hair a frizzy
humid mess,
her face flushed, her
eyes lit like high beams
that it
meant much more than
money.
It was fun.
I loved it.
I loved all of it.
The dirty van and shaggy drivers, who
drove us over potholed two-lane
highways to strange venues
with long tables, gritty floors, and
paper cups filled with sugary juice,
where kids screamed the
second they saw us.
I loved our choreographed dances
set to some mother’s idea
of a cool song on her Spotify.
Although calling anything we did
in those giant costumes dance
was pushing it.
I even loved the taste of plastic mixed with
my own sweaty breath inside the huge head.
Though I especially loved
the view—looking out through the grinning teeth
of a hamburger.
People stared at me,
as they always did,
but with a straight-on smile instead of
side-eye curiosity.
Acknowledgment.
Approval.
Acceptance.
I hadn’t seemed to make
a good human, but
as a hamburger,
I was beloved.


Minnesota
MY MOTHER WAKES ME FROM A SOUND SLEEP. SHE WANTS to talk. I tell her I’m listening, but I’m not… until she says that word.
“… Minnesota?”
I’m listening now.
I logroll off the couch and climb to my feet from my knees with a pretty loud moan.
“You’re leaving me alone for two weeks?”
“I’m not leaving you alone, Eve. You’ll stay with Mary Fay.”
“What? I can’t even stay here in my own home?”
“Eve, it’s an honor to attend the Minneapolis Poetry Society’s retreat and conference. You know I’ve been applying to it for years. This is the first time I’ve gotten beyond their wait list. You have to understand—”
“I don’t have to understand,” I say, cutting her off. “When you’re healing from major surgery you want your own bed.”
My mother sighs. “You sleep on that couch half the time.”
Is this true? I want to fight her on it.
“And your mother. You want your mother,” I add, laying it on pretty thick. “Don’t go,” I whisper.
She’s standing and looking at me. I hate when she does that—looks but doesn’t say anything.
Maybe… maybe she’s changing her mind. Maybe she sees how wrong it is to leave your suffering daughter for a work thing. Maybe she’ll stay.
“I’ll ask Meef to come here, okay?” she says, using my nickname for Mary Fay