Magda felt like a mother crab mercilessly consuming her young, snatching at another piece of bacon. Nothing had tempted her aside from that, so she’d ordered such a large platter on Rina’s stolen credit that the waitress raised an eyebrow. It was all charred so black it snapped with her next bite, just how she liked it. “You want some coffee with that, baby? Somethin’ to… I don’t know, wash it all down?“ Magda shook her head. Only when they were alone again did she suddenly turn back to Rina across the booth. “You know eels could technically be immortal, if they never migrate back to the Sargasso sea? That’s where they go through their last metamorphosis. They can die at five or sixty, it’s conditional. They only fuck in the last year of their life, that’s when they kick it. So, yeah. Whack, dude.” She didn’t tend to talk this much, usually, but she’d made do with a crushed up prescription with a torn off label, fetched from a stranger’s medicine cabinet – a stimulant, clearly, judging by the jitter in her knees, the fact she’d written a jaw dropping volume of code at Otis’ in a small window prior to arrival – and suddenly, eyes both awake and impossibly tired all at once, peeking beneath the brim of her dark green beanie hat, she couldn’t shut up. “And baby bats babble to imitate noises their parents make, like birds and humans – they’re the only species that do. Whack, again. Really makes you think. Don’t know what about, but. Definitely some thinking going on,” she shrugged, eyes flitting in time to catch a man gawking at her huge bacon platter across the diner – acting out of impulse, she pulled a grotesque face like she’d suffered an impromptu spasm, startling him so much that he abruptly set down his mug. Magda turned back to Rina without acknowledging the debacle, jabbing a piece of bacon at them like a finger. “Want some? Tastes like fossils. Distinct undertone of dead stegosaurus, or – uh, probably entelodonts, I guess, since they were the closest thing to pigs, genetically.” @absentsdream
back flat along the diner booth seat, rina can feel points of bone warm painfully against the fissuring, never-been-cleaned sticky wood. a shoulder blade moves beneath them languidly and they put up with the discomfort, if only for the way it makes them delirious, another planet where the air is thick and viscous in their lungs, a slow-moving oxygen supply. the waitress doesn’t appear to like them much; perhaps for the heels of grotty tennis shoes resting against the wall, or the whites of their eyes as she’s watched going to magda with the brown glass coffee pot and a pitcher of cream, mouth agape and head teetering over the end of the bench and stock still otherwise. their knees bend the angle smaller once the waitress leaves, sliding the back of their skull along the seating. “it’s such a chore, too.” rina huffs. gently, minutely, they sat up properly to observe the heaping throne of bacon she wields between greasy fingertips. “like, fucking, after travelling all that way. guess you’d need to be dead to get a good night’s sleep after all that. or the disappointment’d kill you.”
a monologue — about bodily autonomy in a hyperfocused patriarchy, how really, the eels could die if they truly longed for it, the societal norms to accept bad sex as a rite of passage that placates mediocre cishet men and the eternal disappointment it accompanies — is abandoned by a dried-down wad of ketchup glued to a tousle of rina’s hair, when fingers running through it find the treasure in disgust. “i’d rather die, too. this shit stinks so bad.” they’ll have to wash their hair later, begrudgingly, disturb the final licking of shampoo diluted with water in the bottle they’re too cheap to part with yet. “or i’ll leave it. chop it off, put it in a little box. a present for hubie, a bribe to skip my rent this month. a lock of hair’s got the romance.”
whether it’s real life or the grand finale of masterchef, not even the disgruntled man magda’s tormented enough to have dappled his khakis with spilled coffee can tell as rina extends to delicately pluck the bacon off the plate. between their teeth the bacon is acrid and salty, ashen crumbles at the corner of their mouth, thumbed away absentmindedly. “o-oh,” obnoxiously loud, the chef through the kitchen’s window glances over. “my god. my god!” a fist bangs the table, releases to shove another rasher in. “otherworldly. like black garlic, how the french lose their minds over burning it to oblivion but japan, they know what it’s worth. shit’s like gold, wolfe. tell me, where’d you acquire such exquisite taste? that’s real whack.”
