Brandi Wells
Worst Time #6
She worries he’s been in the bathroom too long. Maybe he crawled out the window. Maybe he died. Maybe his hemorrhoids won’t stop bleeding. It ruins her meal. She can’t eat the salad she ordered, the salad she was so excited about. Waiters walk by slowly and stare at her salad. She knows she should eat it. One waiter offers to feed her the salad. He kneels next to her and holds out a fork of lettuce and tomato, making airplane noises. She refuses, though she knows, she knows she should eat the salad. It is a very good sort of salad. A salad other restaurant-goers are jealous of. She knows they are jealous because they come to her two at a time to tell her they are jealous. We are so jealous of your salad, they say.
Worst Time # 25
He watched the same movie all week. He has no idea how many times. He couldn’t tell you what the movie was about, because it was so boring. Maybe it wasn’t about anything. He sometimes jacked off to a scene where a man eats a donut and reads the newspaper. After he returned the movie, he found himself missing it. He would sit outside coffee shops and watch people eat their pastries. In the bathroom he would think of their pastries. The way people opened their mouths to eat. The bits of dough clinging to their tongues and teeth. He couldn’t tell you why, but he missed that movie.
Worst Time # 17
He woke, sure he was supposed to be Phil Collins. But his head was not bald and he was much fatter than Phil Collins ought to be. He sang and his mother yelled to be quiet. Phil Collins’s mother would not yell like this. Phil Collins’s mother would not let him put on all these extra pounds. His body was so heavy. He could barely lug it out of bed. How would he take it downstairs? What if there were never Pop-tarts again? He did not want to think about a Pop-tartless life spent alone upstairs in bed.
Brandi Wells is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama and has fiction in McSweeney’s, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, and Dzanc’s Best of Web. She blogs at brandiwells.blogspot.com.
