Page 45 - WTP Vol. XI #2

In the bedroom, Paul’s breaths crescendoed into snores. ~
It has now been five-hundred-and-thirty weeks and she has never seen that purchase from Tiffany’s. Rose had only been six at the time; Alicia not even one. She had been twenty-eight and recently out of a job. She was a mother.
“H
She tosses the ten-pack of razors into the cart and moves on, wandering mindlessly in the snacks and drinks aisle: Oreos sealed in thin crackly packages, viscous nacho cheese gooped into metal-lidded jars, liter bottles of Barq’s, Coca-Cola, Sprite, and Pepsi begging to be shaken. But Alicia already has enough sandwich crackers at home and Rose always greets her mother with a pack of chips conjured out of thin air and a defiant smirk.
In the pre-Paul years, she’d been addicted to Nilla wafers. They were the first thing she’d bought after moving to college, the only snacks left in a vending machine ransacked by those who’d won an earlier move-in time. She ate them alone at her desk, letting the domes meld into a dry ball in her throat.
~
She was eating Nilla wafers when her roommate walked in during midterms season with a boy be- hind her. She had a hard time thinking of any of her classmates as adults—but more so the men. This was most definitely a boy trailing behind Poppy—a boy in the thick curls tickling the tops of his ears, a boy in the acne dotting his cheeks and in the way he looked at Poppy, as if she had cured him of ailments yet discovered.
“Fred’s just here between classes,” Poppy called from the third rung of her bunk bed ladder.
“Hi,” said Fred. “Hi, I’m—”
“Fred, you coming?” Poppy smiled disapprovingly from her perch, dangling her ankles over the flimsy wooden frame.
“See ya later,” Fred told the wall.
She heard them giggling and rustling, and she wasn’t sure if she should believe that Fred, or any- one, would have an eight-hour gap between classes. Slowly, unwillingly, she grew accustomed to the
er thin lips
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twitched, and for a moment she looked too
young to exist, with all
the brilliance of the medi- cal student who had gone out to the bar after her cadaver lab, not knowing that there she would meet a round-faced sophomore who held her future in his paper-cut palms.”
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