Top 5 pizzas
I didn’t have an answer so I just… wrote small fiction for you
5.) it’s the last sleepover of the final summer before everything will change; you and the other girls can feel the coming transformation in the warm evening air and the ache in your growing limbs. you tell them about the way your bones, your teeth, even your fingernails seem to be growing too long and sharp for your tender strange body, and they nod in sympathy as if they understand. you become silhouettes playing hide and seek in the backyard, bodies blending into shadows as you lose yourselves in the chase. afterwards there’s pizza, greasy cheese and pepperoni, and you chew it two times harder than you need to so that you can forget the way your skin tingled with the thrill of the hunt.
4.) your mother sends you to spend a weekend with your grandmother. she’s a quiet woman, your grandmother, prefers doing chores together to relentless conversation. she suggests making pizza from scratch, with plenty of kneading of dough and flour on your hands. she talks while you work, reminds of the importance of working hard, doing things yourself, and remembering the ancient words to keep you grounded in time when your mind does not feel like your own. say them again, she instructs you. again. again.
3.) in college you go to a party at the house of some stranger, the friend of a girlfriend of a roommate of a friend. the entire night feels wrong, everyone talking about a movie you forgot to see and listening to music that hurts your head, every conversation fizzling out when you make jokes that don’t quite land. the pizza is strange, too, but tolerably so; you learn the charms of spinach and goat cheese that night. it’s your last clear memory of the evening; you leave to get a little fresh air and wind up waking in a ditch, coat gone and dirt beneath your fingernails. you keep ordering spinach goat cheese pizza after that, even though they make the taste of copper ache in your mouth.
2.) you’re travelling alone in a city made of more faces than names. neither business nor pleasure brought you here; even you aren’t sure what you’re seeking, fists shoved deep in a hoodie and speaking to no one. all you have to guide you is half-muddled dream logic that insists, surely, out of so many people one of them must know how to cure you. you walk the streets late into the night, hollow eyes and empty belly, lured in by the occasional neon promise that never fails to disappoint. (fakers, all of them; people like you don’t advertise on Google.) the pizza place you discover is the only one who never lets you down; the locals say that they make it best, something about the depth of the crust, and you have to admit they might actually be right.
1.) some nights you whisper your grandmother’s words and take a sleeping pill to help you shudder through the nightmares, resigned to a morning of blossoming bruises and your own blood in red slivers beneath your nails. some nights you’re too tired to fight that way. the willpower seems monumental to you, the virtue of some long-dead heroes from a generation gone; who today has that kind of willpower? you carry an always-ache around with you like a stone in your stomach, the exhaustion of perpetually straining to keep half of yourself on a leash. some nights you turn yourself loose and hope for the best, content to stagger home in the morning on sore legs and dirty feet. you keep the fridge well-stocked for such mornings, when the hunger of wild transformations threatens to turn you inside out. frozen pizzas, purchases in bulk, can disappear two or three at a time down your gullet as you sit on the floor and pant, thinking in your ravenous state that they might just be the sweetest thing you’ve ever tasted.
