LITTER BOX (IDIOMA DE AMOR)
Josh Rodriguez
I stare into the fridge like I’m attending my own wake and staring into my open casket. Marble face. Blue-purple lips pressed together like irradiated, larval gummy worms. Alkaseltzer dissolving into my clouded eyes.
Maybe it’s an addiction. Who tf knows. All I know is Bbyangel says she can’t leave food around the house because it’ll be gone by the time she’s home. Like how I told her I can’t have beer or pain killers or weed in the house or else I’m gonna get faded. Had to impose an embargo. At least during the week. Because I just have to be in the same room as that shit for the fade to hit critical mass. To be on my cabron shit. And then things start to fall apart. But during the weekend, all bets are off. Sometimes it feels like my demise is an inside job and there’s no de-escalation once it starts.
Bbyangel says if there’s food in the fridge, she knows I’m gonna eat it. And that’s not exactly an unfair summation (or a ringing endorsement.) Painfully accurate tbh. It’s not even about being hungry most of the time. It’s more about boredom. I work from home now. Spend my day hitting the fridge up every hour or so and gorging myself. Say it’s just a “snack” like how I would just have a “beer” at lunch before they got wise and fired my ass. Some strays cannot be domesticated.
Housebreaking some strays is trying to Moss a stray bullet.
Never came clean and told Bbyangel what happened, but that’s neither here nor there. Don’t see why disclosing that matters. Wouldn’t change anything. Still, it used to be funny when I’d eat like that. Almost endearing. She’d shake her head, say, ‘Pinche vato,’ under her breath and just laugh. Lately it’s more of a problem. I eat and eat and eat, never leaving anything for her. Not even scraps. Though leaving scraps would probably be more insulting than anything. Like, Wtf do you think I am, bro, a dog?
‘Y las flautas? No me dejaste nada?’ she asks when she gets home from the salon she works at, ‘Comiste todas?’
I talk in a passive mumble like a kid getting scolded and avert my eyes, like she neutered me and wears my severed nuts on a necklace to send a mfing message, ‘Estaba alli…Tuve hambre…idk.’
‘Te dije que quiero comerlas cuando regreso del trabajo. Lo recuerdas?’
She looks at me like I just peed with the toilet seat down (which, full disclosure, I might have done as well.) I wring my hands and look at my chancla-sheathed feet, ‘Pues, si…pero…tuve un chingo de hambre…’
I don’t really have anything else to say. Barely understand what the big deal is tbh. I’ve always been a Bermuda Triangle of shame. We sit in our cramped Tijuana apartment. Vomit-green walls and ramshackle kitchen tucked into one corner. A makeshift sink with a rack to dry dishes. Hot plate on top of the mini-fridge in lieu of a stove. Toaster in lieu of an oven with a dehumidifier that emits resplendent luminescence. Changes colors every few seconds. Microwave mounted like a TV in a taqueria. A giant shoe rack we use as a dresser and handrails converted into a place to hang clothes. Cold, unforgiving concrete walls like in a jail cell. Damp, suffocating air. Faux-wood flooring.
Outside, it’s car horns blaring. Dogs barking at dogs barking at dogs barking. Someone yelling for my neighbor Pepe outside his house every hour because doorbells aren’t a thing here. It’s what dogs are for lol. Dead ass. Doesn’t matter if it’s 2 P.M. or 3 A.M., someone’s out there yelling his name. The silence in our apartment is still more deafening than the cacophony outside. It’s altitude clogging my ears and cotton balls stuffed in my skull. Bbyangel tells me I have a problem. I know that means she’ll add that shit to the long list of amendments she’d like to make to my constitution.
Every girl has a list. And the lists never stop.
She wastes no time sending me to the editing bay. She never does and sometimes I think it’s what made me fall in love with her in the first place.
I light a cigarette and stare up at the white ceiling. Think this must be what she feels like when she prays and convinces herself God will sort all her shit out on her behalf, like he/she/they/it were just a cosmic fiduciary with a existential power of attorney. Only costs your soul to enlist their services. Surrendering to a higher power.
‘I have a plan,’ she says, ‘To work on this. Make a solution.’
She’s all about finding solutions. I’m more about pretending the problem doesn’t really exist in the first place. If it doesn’t self-correct, I’m more than happy to just let it fall apart. Like, maybe—just maybe—you can will these things into non-existence. Reverse manifestation.
‘What’s that?’ I ask. Somehow relieved at the simple prospect of a plan.
She’s always treating our relationship like a math equation or shitty car that keeps breaking down you won’t replace because you can’t afford to. While I treat it like a litter box in which I defecate and wait for someone else (usually her) to change.
‘We won’t keep food around the house anymore. Only when we’re going to eat. So you won’t be tempted. Maybe this is how you can learn to control yourself.’
The truth is this probably cuts her deeper than me because she metes out her love for me in food. Each dish is an overture. A literal expression of her love. Deprivation and over-indulgence are two sides of the same coin for me, and that coin, that emotional currency, is my love language. Mi idioma de amor. We’ve always had a tacit understanding of how this works. An unspoken contract that binds this relationship. Like, as long as one of those extremes is on the table and ready for me to dig in, we’re in good shape. As long as we have that efectivo, we won’t go bankrupt.
It sometimes feels like there are two people inside me: someone on the brink of death on a hunger strike for some undeterminable (but definitely lost) cause and someone who sees My 700 Pound Life the same way kids see making the league. The one on hunger strike, feeding the other all the food he’s petulantly refusing to eat in some twisted iteration of a feeder fetish, creating a toxic, codependent relationship with myself.
Btw, I’m thoroughly convinced most Mexican girls have a feeder fetish the way they stuff you with food until you’re practically insensate, at which point they conveniently always start difficult conversations when you barely have the energy to move let alone push back. But me? I just smile like a suture. Exhale a gaunt contrail of smoke. My lungs get tight. My chest starts hurting. My breaths get short and shallow.
I marvel at how she really gets me. I realize something in that moment:
There are two kinds of people in this world, her and everyone else.
Like always, I’m on board at first. We start going to Calimax and purchasing food like a Doomsday Cult thoroughly convinced the world will end each night.
Lately, every day feels like my own personal apocalypse.
You don’t know trust satiation—satisfaction—until every meal is your last meal.
Life hasn’t felt so good in a while.
We eat dinner with the intent of not having leftovers the next day. A license to binge for the entire night. Feel like this is what I was put on earth to do. Like what Jordan must have felt the first time he touched a basketball. I wake up the next day feeling gross. Practically hungover. I’m my own experimental DIY taxidermy project stuffed with excrement like a diaper instead of cotton. I step outside and light a cigarette. Yawn, burp, and stretch. Rub my eyes with the back of my hand.
The sun and clouds look sewn onto the sky like shitty punk patches on a denim vest. Scroll through my phone with a crack like a lightning bolt running down the middle. Retribution from a vindictive God. I start mapping out the freelance work I have that day and think about the conversation when I was stupefied by gluttony the night prior. Got into uncomfortable territory. Bbyangel is in therapy, actively works on herself. She’s all about self-improvement and bettering herself. Told me I should start doing things to give back to the world. Acts of service. She alleges it’d help.
I joked that this is new territory for me, and historically speaking, exploring uncharted territory doesn’t yield the most judicious or humanitarian results. Like, I’m just gonna eradicate and oppress whatever those mechanisms are I have yet to encounter. She hits me with a reverse Uno card and says it’s typical colonizer speak to equate my debased impulses to indigenous people.
What can I say? When she’s right, she’s right.
I draw more cards, apologize, and keep it pushing.
I wasn’t entirely convinced, but I capitulated. Even believed it almost. Usually when she talks to me about bettering myself, I say something along the lines of, ‘You can’t polish a turd,’ which apparently gets less funny each time I say it. Diminishing returns type beat. But I’d gone comatose and just laid decommissioned. Fish eyes. Breathing like a ventilator. Sometimes day-to-day living is being on life support for me. I listened to her like I was in a state of sleep paralysis and she was a grisly, shadowy demon visiting me. Couldn’t really rebuke or evade her. Just had to lie there and let her water board me with her care and concern like a wrongly interred prisoner. I’d gladly give up the answers she was trying to torture out of me if I had them. But I never do.
Though I’m by no means innocent.
Love sometimes feels like a stint in Guantanamo.
Cut to right now. She’s at work. It’s just me and Tuna, our cat, in the apartment.
No food. No brew. No weed. No Tramadol. No nothing. FML.
Just scrolling through my timeline and finding excuses not to work. Sitting on the couch. Ordering coffee to be delivered. Start feeling hungry. Famished. Instincts start holding me hostage. Spend hours browsing Uber Eats, Didi, and Rappi. Iykyk. Never buying anything. Just imagining what it’d be like to eat. Try conjuring counterfeit satiation. Browse them with all the dignity of a cheater browsing sordid subreddits and classified ads and swiping through dating apps to get off. Sexting with people but never following through and, like, fucking them, so they rationalize and justify the behavior. Convincing themselves it’s not cheating because there was no skin-to-skin contact.
Absolving themselves on a technicality, bro.
Like a quarterback lobbying for a ref to pick up a flag.
Trying to exploit some kind of loophole.
I look at Tuna hunched over her bowl of food. Tiny brown pellets. Almost looks like chips. I’ve always been more of a salty and savory kinda guy than a sweet and soft-baked one. I start getting jealous. My stomach starts growling. Can’t leave too much food out for her either. She apparently has a similar issue with over-indulging. But she still has food to munch on. Spoiled ass cat, bro. She even has health insurance. I don’t even have health insurance. Can’t help but wonder what that food tastes like.
She can’t get enough of it. So good she doesn’t even look up when she eats it. Must slap. I know she eats bugs, so her palate isn’t exactly refined, but I can’t imagine the shit I eat is much better. Protein’s protein, bro. Every time I start making progress on my work, I catch myself looking at it. Get distracted. Entranced. Like it’s beckoning me. Temptation. Like a parallel universe where the forbidden fruit was hanging off a cat tree. It gets so my mouth waters when I look at that bowl of food. It’s all I can think about. I go to the fridge and look inside to distract myself, less like I was hoping it would magically have food and more like I was hoping for that Indiana Jones scene where they open the Ark of the Covenant and their faces melt off their skulls like nacho cheese.
I open the fridge hoping it’ll obliterate me. But I’ve never been lucky.
I have to take a cold shower to snap out of it. And even that only helps a little.
Because I bet that shit’s savory, too.
That night, Bbyangel comes home, and I greet her with the same excitement a dog greets their owner with. It’s pavlovian. I hear the big, steel door outside click open like a reinforced door in prison. I know I’m about to eat. Mouth waters and ears start ringing.
Tuna has the same reaction. I can tell Bbyangel thinks it’s weird I bombard her with that energy upon her arrival. Definitely unusual. Borderline sus. But she doesn’t say anything. Just looks at me like I’m a homeless person asking for money. Can’t help but feel indignant. Like, What—it’s OK if Tuna does it, but if I do it, I’m bugging?
‘Hola, baby,’ I say, ‘Como estuve trabajo?’
‘Bien,’ she says, ‘Tuve un chingo de citas. Estoy cansada.’
She knows what I’m pussyfooting around. She wastes no time retrieving food she bought at the carniceria on her way home. Rice, beans, chicken, and corn tortillas. The smell fills the room, and I get a contact high. Like she was hot boxing the apartment and I wasn’t in the mood to smoke but got zooted nonetheless. Like, OK—OK, if you’re gonna twist my arm like the tip of that joint…
I sit on the couch and try to distract myself with my phone. Tuna climbs into my lap. I look at Tuna’s carrita bonita and rub her under her chin like she likes with my forefinger. She goes full chinita con sus ojitos and I realize in that moment that I could never stay mad at her. I smell the food Bbyangel’s making and look at her.
As fucked up as it sounds, I don’t know if I’ve ever loved her as much as I do rn. All that other shit I was feeling almost melts away in that moment. But I still find myself looking at Tuna’s bowl. Eyes gravitate to it like when there’s an imperfection that constantly draws your gaze.
Like when your friends point out a flaw in your significant other and it’s all you can notice, making you hit Seinfeld levels of psychopathy that’s pure tragedy without the laugh track. Laughter’s mostly a coping mechanism. It has diminishing returns as you develop a tolerance. But I’ve learned pushing all your friends away until you don’t have any is a life hack that helps with that. Because some friends will go full Taken and try to extricate you from any romantic arrangement. Whether it’s well-intentioned or not.
I look at the bowl. Tuna left me leftovers. The pellets of food entice me somehow. My mouth waters. I swallow saliva. Choke on it like a hairball and try to play it off.
Bbyangel asks, ‘Puedes limpiar la mesa y arreglar tus cosas?’
‘Si, baby,’ I oblige.
We sit down and eat, and it’s good. I stuff food down my throat like a dirty sock in a hostage’s mouth to stifle blood-curdling screaming. To stymy the whimpering and muffle the crying. Like I’m holding myself hostage. I eat eight tacos in an hour and hope it’ll temper my brain. But I can’t stop thinking about Tuna’s food. My brain orbits it like a planet orbiting the sun. I can’t sleep because it’s all I think about. Technically it’s food left out, and Bbyangel said we have to finish it all. Technically, bro. Technically…
Love is fashioning nooses out of loopholes.
The next day, I kiss Bbyangel goodbye. She leaves out a plate of breakfast for me like leaving out food for a dog. My stomach still feels funky from eating as much as I did. I’m exhausted. Obsessed over Tuna’s food all night. Barely slept a wink.
Tell Bbyangel I’m exhausted when I wake up, too. When she asks why I couldn’t sleep, I can’t bring myself to say the reason. Realize I have no good reason to offer so I shouldn’t have said anything. Tell her I just couldn’t is all. Look at her like, Just drop it, OK? There’s something ignoble about it. Like some debased fetish that triggers the Catholic guilt baked into the fibers of your conscience and makes you hate yourself.
Self-hate is my love language.
I get an email from a client asking for an update on two deliverables. An article and a newsletter. I was supposed to get them done yesterday, but I was too distracted. Tell them it’s on my list of to-dos today and make up some bullshit excuse. I resolve to be productive. Take an inventory of top-priority tasks. Feel some kind of fortitude, like I’m gonna buckle down and get to work. Get my shit together and put my nose to the grindstone. But fuck. All I think about is that food.
My stomach doesn’t growl, it purrs.
Tuna hunches over her bowl like she’s mocking me. I hear her eating and it sounds like someone walking across gravel. I go to the fridge and look inside like I was hoping food would magically appear. That it’d manifest like a water stain of the Virgen Maria or Virgen Fatima or Virgen de Guadalupe or some shit. It seems like all I hear about in Mexico are virgins, but I haven’t met one since I’ve been here. I don’t know what I expected to find, but I can’t help feeling disappointed by the empty fridge.
Start feeling like I’d settle for spoiled, mold-bearded food at this point.
I guzzle Peñafiel. Order coffee. Try to work. But my brain keeps returning to that bowl of food. And I don’t know what comes over me, but I eventually snap. Can’t take it anymore. I wait until Tuna is taking one of her daily naps on our bed (must be nice), get down on all fours, and crawl to the food bowl with all the trepidation of traversing a minefield. I inch closer and closer, and my body trembles.
When I’m close enough to smell it, I freeze. The closer I get, the more I feel it crush me like an empty beer can beneath a boot. Turns my ass 2-D. The pressure mounting like each inch closer was a fathom deeper in the ocean. Nearly go catatonic before finally parallel parking my ass next to that mf.
Stare into the bowl. Still as a mannequin. Brain, swelling with the kinda feedback you get when you hold a microphone too close to a PA system.
I scoop out a handful of the food like scooping out kitty litter, and I hold it like treasure I just uncovered. I sit like that for maybe five minutes, practically prostrating myself. Supplicant. It’s the closest I’ve come to praying since I can remember. I bury my face in it and take a big whiff like perverts who order used panties online.
And, bro—that shit hits. I start seeing spots, go lightheaded, and can barely bring myself to my senses. Have to drag myself back to them like taking a pet to the vet. I start reeling for a minute while I eventually manage to reorient myself. I dump the food back in. It takes every ounce of self-control I have not to stuff it in my mouth. I look over at Tuna, who’s staring at me with judgmental marble eyes. Can’t get read on her. Feel like she’s gonna rat or sth. You are what you eat fr fr.
Never trusted her tbh. So I mad dog the gatito.
I stare at her like, ‘Que, cabrona? Callate tu hocico. No haras nada, morra.’
I keep dreaming that I look in the mirror and see a grainy black and white MISSING ad of myself staring back with my expiration date stamped across my forehead, but 10 years younger. Like those pictures on milk cartons.
I stare at my reflection like watching bird shit dry on a windshield.
They say everything has an expiration date. Who tf knows if that’s true.
One can only hope we’re so lucky.
Don’t know why but it feels like I should mention Tuna is more of a step-cat. Bbyangel had her when we started dating, and they were a package deal. When she moved in, it was just something I had to accept. Newton’s Third Law type beat.
I accepted Tuna the same way Bbyangel makes me eat veggies when she makes me algo rico. I kept making jokes about how I was gonna put her in the calle. How I’d find a way to get rid of her. That she’d just disappear one day. I wouldn’t actually do it obvi. But it’s the only way I know how to flirt. Autism is my love language.
The thing I didn’t account for is growing so fond of the cat. That I’d even start loving it and would be the one getting in trouble for spoiling it. Even spoiling it to be passive aggressive and piss Bbyangel off occasionally. Love is a proxy war.
I guess my point is this only makes the ordeal all the more fucked up.
Jealous of our child on some Oedipal ish.
I need something to quiet the thoughts. Something to abate them at least. I sit on the couch with this dour demeanor you’d expect to see at a funeral.
Sin distracciones, I’ll end up sitting like that for hours. Staring at the food with that same dead-eyed stare cats and dogs have when they’re shitting or peeing. Avoiding eye contact. Self-awareness rendered a byproduct of vulnerability. Reduced to a survival mechanism engrained in your instincts. Sometimes it feels like the only time I’m self-aware is when the world is plotting to snuff me out. Tho my paranoid, pot-addled, and undeveloped mind used to think it was the other way around. Bbyangel says when my brain gets obsessive and intractable, I should find a way to distract myself.
‘What do you think getting faded was?’ I want to say when she administers thrifted therapy. Distracciones son mi idioma de amor. Instead, I only ever nod and mumble in agreement. Never really say what I want to say. Love is a splitting atom; it’s being in dissonance. I go to the fridge like I could just will food into existence but open it and stare inside like opening a check at a restaurant you already know you can’t afford.
I should be working because I’m already behind. Usually when I feel like this, I scroll through my phone. Itinerantly bouncing from app to app like a nomad. Beat my meat every few hours until cumming feels like ripping a fart. But those impulses have been supplanted by this other thing. That bowl of food that Tuna visits intermittently. I don’t really mean to start watching it, but it just happens. Sounds like a cop out, but I don’t know how else to describe it. I end up watching commercials for cat food.
Which feels even more humiliating to admit than watching furry porn involving two people dressed as cats. I scroll through a few before I find the one I like. The one I literally watch on a loop to sate my hunger like an alcoholic watching Leaving Las Vegas to drink vicariously. Symbiotically. It doesn’t exactly make that desire subside, but it at least keeps me from getting a taste. Delays the inevitable.
The one I watch goes like this:
It starts with two cats. Airbrushed, photo-shopped, and everything as if they were insecure about how they’d appear on camera. Like, if a camera adds 10 lbs, imagine what it feels like when you barely weight 12 lbs to begin with. One even has abs.
They walk through a giant gate reminiscent of the proverbial ‘pearly gates,’
For the record, if heaven exists, I hope this is it.
They slowly enter, looking around in awe with a golden sidewalk beneath them and a giant Ferris Wheel in the background. The sky is a deep blood red, and the clouds look like purple cotton candy. It’s like a Willy Wonka Factory I’d actually want to visit.
‘It really exists. It’s Crispy’s World!’ Cat 1 says in awe, an orange and white specimen of a feline. Legit the mfing Myles Garret or Nick Bosa of cats.
‘Look at the choices!’ Cat 2 adds, a black and white cat with a gravelly voice.
‘No way—extra gravy!’ Cat 1 says, motioning with a nod to a giant volcano in the distance spouting gravy flowing like spittle down a baby’s chin.
Cat 1 hits a lever. They ride in two carts that are giant tins of cat food, looking around and traveling down a river of milk. ‘
‘Look at the little soups!’
‘And there’s the shreds of meat!’
‘Man, Crispie’s has it all—can I have it all? Pleaaassseee?’
The camera pans out to them eating a sumptuous feast of different bowls on a table, and it pans out further to show a sign erected along the gate that looks like a marquis and reads: Crispie’s Treats: Let Them Feast. A girl-ish woman’s voice reads it while another voice sings ♪ Crispie’s ♫ in a jingle after.
I watch it for hours on repeat. Hypnotized. I don’t even realize how much time passes. I start imagining it’s a real place. It becomes my El Dorado or Atlantis. Like, imagine the spoils I would enjoy after that expedition. Before I know it, it’s time for Bbyangel to get home. Fuck. I still haven’t gotten work done. But there’s always tomorrow. A new day means new excuses.
One day at a time. This, this is the way.
I wait until Bbyangel comes back to eat. I have no choice. Try convincing myself it’s fasting, but it’s more like convincing myself a litter box is a beach. Lol.
I look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘Cope harder bro.’
All I can think about is the cat food. I sit with a face like a rubber dollar-store mask staring at it. Eyes, burned out headlights in my skull. Flat, glossy, and ineffectual. I try to get work done, and manage to get through some things, but still fall further behind. I gotta get it together. But I can’t mfing concentrate now that I got a whiff of it.
Trying to push that hunger out of my mind is like trying to choke out a crash test dummy. I smelled that fistful of cat food pellets and it was like a sommelier smelling a glass of vino with the smarmy demeanor and intonation of a snake-oil salesman. Talking about the notes and undertones and all that shit and it sounding more like they were clairvoyant corresponding with the dead. I convince myself I can smell the beef, chicken, and veggies. Convince myself the chicken is free range, too. So I feel less shitty over this hunger. Like, at least it’s ethically sourced.
Would cannibalized hippy vegans be free-range and ethically sourced, too? These are the tangents I let myself follow to distract myself from the hunger.
Bbyangel gets home and brings supplies for tortas. Bolillos y carne asada. I sit on the couch with all the charm of a scarecrow while she cooks. Suck at a cigarette. Scroll through my phone while Scarface plays muted on the TV. The scene where he drinks the water they bring him in Bolivia to wash his hands with. Eats the oranges in it and everything. Right before they hang that dude from the helicopter. Always fucking kills me. Even the smell of cooking meat can’t rout the incomparable smell of the cat food from my nose. It’s impregnable in my nostrils. I wish my senses would make sense.
‘Are you OK?’ Bbyangel asks.
‘Yeah, why?’
‘You’ve looked weird these days.’
‘Just tired.’
‘Hm. OK.’
‘What?’
‘No te creo, pero si lo dices.’
Shit. Never thought I’d have to worry about me snitching on myself.
It’s always the people you most expect. Stg.
I go to the tiendita while she’s cooking. Busting a mission to get more water, frijoles, and aguacate. Can’t drink water out of the tap here, and I go through about three liters of Peñafiel a day. Used to go all the way to Oxxo before I knew this tiendita took card. Just assumed they didn’t. A completely baseless assumption, too, tbh.
The tiendita’s right around the corner. A three-minute walk.
Pass the Chinese-themed bar. The new Fresa hipster spot. Hit or miss on whether it’s full. When it’s not, it’s just loud music playing to an empty beer garden and the most depressing thing you’ve ever laid eyes on. Pass the giant near-condemned house I love that Bbyangel is convinced is a narco safe house. Pass the house that always has a security guard posted up outside. Like, 24/7. Means someone important lives there. Bbyangel says it must be a narco. Says the safehouse must be for whatever narco lives there. Same security guard who greets Bbyangel with a, ‘Buenos noches,’ every time she passes but only ever eyes at me like I’m scheming to lick that mfing house. Shouldn’t bother me as much as it does. Passed where the perrito yaps and attacks me. Gets out and starts nipping at my ankles. Bbyangel would probably say that mutt has narco ties, too.
The tiendita is one long narrow aisle. There’s a freezer with ice cream jutting out like a barricade that bisects it so you have to walk out and around to the second door when there’s a line. Cooler with tortillas. Loosie cigarettes for sale. Caguamas. Misma mierda, differente tiendita. Stomach’s growling like barrio dogs looking for scraps. I browse the store and look at the papitas and other junk food. There is no one else inside. Guy behind the register plays Mexican rap music on tinny phone speakers. I grab water, beans, avocado, and go to get a roll of toilet paper. On the way, I see pet food.
I see the cat food in my periphery and just stand there and stare. Transfixed. Captivates me in a way nothing else in this store does. Must be what Tuna experiences when we play sounds of cats meowing to fuck with her. To make her start going crazy. Like a psyop or MK-Ultra experiment. Scrambling her brain for shits and giggles. I look at the cat food and imagine it with chamoy and Valentina’s.
A little limon for good measure.
Fuck it, might as well make it like tostilocos.
I stand there so long my mouth starts watering. My eyes glaze over. I go full Smeagol staring at the cat food. Look at the different flavors. Pescado. Pollo. Atun. Res.
I start wondering how they taste. See the fancy, wet food and the dry kibble, and wonder what it’s like to indulge in the former. How much better it must taste. Seems more decadent. Comfort food for cats. I snap out of it eventually and glance at the guy working the register. He looks at me like I’m out my box.
I go over, pay, and leave. Light a cigarette as soon as I step outside. Need to calm my nerves. Can’t stop thinking about the food. The menu of options. Decide to check the flavor of what we have later. Bbyangel gives me the same spiel when I get back. Tells me I should work on myself. Talks about bettering myself.
I agree but keep it noncommittal. Because my feet stay cold, bro. Like Antonio Brown’s. Iykyk. I tell her I’ll see what I can do to put a few of her recommendations into practice. See if it makes a difference. Baby steps. I even believe I will for a minute even though we both know I won’t. She insists on therapy, and I hit her with a strong, Tal vez.
‘Baby,’ she says as she’s finishing the tortas, ‘You know you talk in your sleep? You’ve been saying a lot of stuff the last few nights.’
Hijo de puta. I worry I spilled the frijoles on myself. Feels less like spilling the beans and more like a gas leak.
‘What do I say?’ is all I think to ask. Heart races. Stomach torques.
‘You keep asking, Is this bad ass? You ask it over and over and over.’
Lol. On brand, bro. We both laugh, and I feel something like relief.
I manage to stomach the food and eat until I can’t move and then lay on the couch like a blanket draped over it. I eat like a semi-sentient garbage disposal. Think of the cat food the whole time. I wait until Bbyangel’s asleep, which means Tuna’s asleep. So the coast is clear. I even pretend talking in my sleep so she thinks I’m asleep and goes to sleep.
Yeah, I know. It’s a whole thing.
When I’m convinced I’m the only one awake, I get up as quietly as possible and avoid sudden movements. I get on my hands and knees and slowly crawl to the food. I glance over my shoulder, and Tuna’s woken up. I see her big eyes staring at me like two curious searchlights. Hope she doesn’t move. Raise my index finger to my lips like, shhh. She actually listens for once. I inch closer and closer to her food bowl. When I get to it, I grab one of the pebbles and look at it like an artifact. Like it was something precious. Like treasure I found. Hold it to my nose again and basically get high off it. Was absolutely stuffed before smelling it, but I’m famished afterward.
Fuck. Look back, and Tuna’s still staring at me like I was an animal in the zoo. I look at the pebble for a few minutes, pop it in my mouth like a painkiller, and chew. It’s harder than I expected, but it tastes like nothing I’ve had before.
It’s like chewing on a rock at first. I can’t help but think of that Strange Addictions episode about the woman who’s addicted to eating rocks. Like, Bro, I finally get it. Only thing I can liken it to is when someone finds religion late in life and sees the light. When they have that moment of clarity that saves their soul. I put another in my mouth, then another, and I try deducing the flavor like wine tasting. Roll them around with my tongue. After deliberation, I land on chicken.
I decide I’ll check to see if I’m right the next day.
It feels like I’m going to wake up with purpose. That I have a mission, something akin to a crusade. Can’t tell you the last time I went to bed feeling like the next day wouldn’t amount to little more than a stamped out cigarette butt you scrape off the sidewalk or dredge out of an ashtray and get a few drags out of praying to God it’s not menthol. After eating that food, I go to bed more sated than I’ve been in years. Normally, I’d stare at my phone screen into the early hours or morning, wake up feeling like shit, and suffer through the day. But I don’t even feel the need to do that tonight.
That compulsion is attenuated.
I simply am, and that’s finally enough.
My name is Josh Rodriguez, and I'm a writer living in Tijuana, Mexico, with my girlfriend. I've had fiction published in Door is A Jar Magazine, Expat Press, FIVE:2:ONE Magazine, Silent Auctions Magazine, Black Flowers Journal, Heavy Feather Review, Purple Wall Stories, Sledgehammer Lit, Loud Coffee Press, Fugitives & Futurists, Stone of Madness Press, and Maudlin House. I have a novella out via Alien Buddha Press entitled, 'FAMINE: Get the Hell Outta Here While You Still Can,' and a collection due out in Spring 2024 via Thirty West Publishing House entitled, 'some things you love with your insides, your guts,' about a flat earth cult.