February 2, 2010 Lit Writ

Lit Writ

Fritter

by Alex Manley

GRAPHIC ALEX MANLEY

You know as you’re eating it that it’s shit, pure shit, of course. You knew just from the look of it.

You’ve lived in this city, lived off this city, long enough, but you know for real as soon as you bite into the fries. The heat, kills your taste buds, so you don’t notice they’re nothing but sticks of waxy salt anyway, falling apart, soggily, burnily crumbling. What’s that term, piping hot?

The same process takes place on your fingers as you shovel them into your oven-mouth. Pipe, pipe, pipe. Potatoes conserve heat so well, you know. Little heat traps. Bursting, exploding heat bombs.

The bun is wet, too, from the dog’s sweat. Funny how they sweat, rolling around between the rungs—roll, roll—producing oceans of salty meat juice, running down the ramp. And then there’s the onion shavings, the melting plastic cheese—like an art installation.

Of course you insist on mayonnaise each time. Mayonnaise. What a thing it is. Never can tell whether it’s disgusting or delicious. It’s all about how much you think about it. If you don’t think, it’s fine. It’s slightly salty and it’s tasty and it’s fine. If you start going over it in your mind, all the millions of Wal-Mart, Costco, Super C tubs large enough to fit a newborn in, all the seven-year-old half-empties in the fridge doors of dead people, old people from Agincourt, Richmond Hill, sequestered in their Ontario towns, slowly dying librarians.

You’re thinking about your grandmother, of course. You read just a little bit too much of that Stephen King book in Chapters once: Dreamcatcher. With the mayonnaise-bacon-raw sandwiches and all the shit, the actual shit. And the alien ass-weasels. Mayonnaise. Embalmed in it. You swallow anyway.

Before you know it you’re on your last bite already, hands slick with grease and a slight sheen of shame. You let the morsel linger in your hand, trying not to crush it with your thumb-pressure, staring at it longingly, wishing it would reptile-tail itself back to fulness, wishing you had enough pocket change for another. But you don’t and the thought of spending a dollar or two, of using their grubby, grey little dwarf ATM tucked in the dirty corner over there sickens you in a strange, bone-marrow place in your psyche. Not that you’re cheap.

The machine seems unrightably wrong. How many friends of friends of yours have had their bank accounts emptied by scam set-ups like this one? All the tech geek hack wizardry used for wrong. Here again. Intrinsically bad. Geeks were not supposed to be criminals. That was all wrong, all against the flow of things.

You look down at your hands. It’s gone. You ate it without realizing. That’s the worst. Like listening to your favourite song while you’re thinking about something else; oh, it’s gone. Don’t even remember hearing it.

Alright, well, that’s that. Shove through the door and go. You need to get home without falling over; at least to get home without the shit you just ate all falling out of you, ungloved hands on the rain-covered ice, your new jean-knees getting soaked, the night’s alcohol roiling through you, a burn on your throat, and then it’s all rivulets in the gutter, everything wet, everything dark, everything gross and disgusting and impossibly impossible.

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