It was a night stuck in time. The pizza was warm, and biting into it myself felt like a sin. I let the grease slide down my chin. I knew no one would care because I was the one no one cared about. I watched my mother in the kitchen with a spatula in her hand. My stepfather was getting bigger and bigger in presence. He would talk, and the newspaper on the table would multiply. He would boast, the trash on the floor would double, and he would yell, the clothes and blankets on the sofa tripled. I stuffed a scoop of melting vanilla ice cream into my mouth. They both left to get more food at a high-end steakhouse. They had the munchies. I ate four dark chocolate-covered almonds on the couch. I was overwhelmed by the blankets. The floors were toys, newspapers, magazines, pizza boxes. The television ran its news report and I looked up towards it. “I trusted you…” I heard garbled in time as the rooms all swirled into their own frenzy of chaos. I knew the stomach ache would never come because I was not really a human to anyone. I was discarded material observing ghosts enjoy their high. I woke up before the couch turned into a blanket ocean and the news report sank slowly into analog static. My hope is that whatever departed people do, that they always eat well.
Ali Huff believes that dreams are the purest products of the unconscious. They are nonlocal, but she has always been a Virginia local. She has had short works published in Detritus Magazine and with ExPat Press, as well as a self-published first book of poems, The Sea Inside. You can find her sharing Polaroid photography on Instagram, fueling more liminally-charged realms for the eyes at @mossrockphoto
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Sad story, great read!