pop tarts
BY AVERY COOK
A long-legg-ed model selling me a hiking boot, and also selling me another hiking boot, reached a spray-tan-orange arm out of the glossy magazine page and grabbed me by the neck. She held on tightly with only the one hand, and suddenly someone hung up a mirror in the wall of my mind, where I could look at myself and see my eyes bulging and about to fall out of my skull. If she had a similar someone hanging a similar mirror for her, did she stare at her long legs for so long that her attention never reached her arm, closed around my neck. Did she have to look in the mirror to know she was killing me?
Despite being strangled I was still very hungry- I had been hungry and waiting for a Pop Tart when I opened the magazine. The toaster spring made a noise like my Pop Tart was ready, so I had really no choice but to walk through the house with this magazine hanging off my neck, and perfect hand effectively clamped around my airway. I was embarrassed at first because the ad was on the more scandalous side- the (not yet successful) (you might say “up and coming”) murderer had only a sports bra and short-ish outdoor activity shorts covering her smooth, unmarked skin. And of course, the one boot and the other boot that she wanted desperately to sell to me.
Betty commented on the photo in the advertisement as I walked by her on the way to the kitchen. She is always in the living room, stationed on the sofa in a way that provides a good view of anyone passing through. This is important to her because the only thing she truly enjoys is assessing others’ little quirks and other people’s magazines that they have hanging off their neck like some sort of heirloom pendant.
“Got something new to creep over, you old creep?” she asked me. I thought of just keeping on towards the kitchen, but if you don’t indulge her a little, she’ll be the one keeping on, and it’ll never end until you answer her.
“I’m not creeping, Betty, you know I’m not.” My voice sounded raspy under the beautiful grip that had not loosened a bit. I could smell the strawberry sugary goodness of my Pop Tart drift through the air, through I couldn’t breathe it in as deeply as I do most mornings. “I’m on my way to grab my Pop Tart, so I can’t talk right this minute anyway.”
“Yeah you can’t talk to me, you old creep.” She crossed her arms, accidentally crumpling in them the cross-stitch on her lap. She had been sewing a cardinal in a snowy branch before I came through. Or before someone else had come through and broken her concentration before me. She turned towards the window, looking at nothing in particular since the Sun hadn’t come up yet. “Eugene ate your Pop Tart, anyway,” she told me. She was lying, of course. She didn’t even know a Eugene.
“Well I can flush another one, then,” I answered, and went on to the kitchen, the magazine dangling like a pendulum and smacking the doorframe as I walked through it. I felt the grip tighten in reaction to the impact, but it loosened back to normal instantly.
The toaster was empty despite the smell of my warm Pop Tart, and the empty Pop Tart wrapper I’d left on the counter lay beside it. Perhaps a mouse had grown especially strong, doing something like holding on a man’s neck for as long as possible until the man died of asphyxiation or until his little mouse arm got tired and slipped back into its magazine. Perhaps he had grown strong enough to hoist both of my warm, delicious, gooey strawberry Pop Tarts onto his tiny, furry mouse shoulders and lug them away into his hole in the wall. I was only angry with him for a moment because it occurred to me that my two Pop Tarts might be the first food his family has had in days. The kitchen is always clean and crumb-free, so the mouse is probably just barely getting by. Two strawberry Pop Tarts should be enough to feed his family for a while, I guessed. He seemed to me like the type of mouse to have a nice homemaker wife and three or four respectable and respectful children.
I think I was over-hungry, thinking about the mouse and all of his life story, so I decided to grab another package of Pop Tarts. I popped them in the toaster, still considering a man hunt for where the mice were living. I could do this when I got home from work this evening.
Diane walked in the kitchen just as I flushed my second batch of Pop Tarts for the morning. “I am sorry Eugene got to your other ones first,” she told me, nodding the crown of her gray head to my Pop Tarts. She had a nice voice to hear in the morning. Like she was always telling you something that a wise person came up with a long time ago.
“It wasn’t a Eugene, Diane. It was a mouse, I think.” She took a second to hear what I was saying, probably because I was speaking so softly to accommodate the lady’s fist, which had to be growing tired by now.
“Well I think we can probably put the magazine down to eat our breakfast, whether Eugene had Pop Tarts this morning or not,” she said, moving towards me and the lady in the magazine. It was inconvenient to have to calculate my movements as to not smack anything around me with the magazine when I turned my head.
“Diane, it’s clamped on my neck, like you see, and it makes it harder to breathe but I can’t break it off, either,” I explained to her. Sometimes she just could not see what I saw in my mind’s mirror.
She grabbed the magazine with both hands and gently lifted it from my hand. I hadn’t even realized I had been holding it, but when I looked down, the boot woman’s arm was gone, too. “Does that feel a little better?” she asked me.
I rubbed my neck and discovered that the only hand around it was mine, big and cold. “I suppose, but the breathing is still a bit hard- I think she bent my airway out of shape.” I raised my chin up to offer Diane a better look. “Does it seem like my voice box is crooked or anything?”
“Hm,” she scrunched her lips together, but I knew that meant she could not see what I was telling her about. She “Hm”-ed me a few times every day. I knew the sound and the look by now.
My Pop Tarts came up.
“If you are having a hard time breathing, I want you to sit down right here for a minute,” she took me by the shoulders (which were way above her head so she had to reach up beyond her own head almost) and gently pushed me backward until the backs of my knees met a seat.
“Could you grab my Pop Tart quick? The mouse will get more if we leave it too long.” She pulled down on me to make me sit in the chair. I watched the toaster around her large, paisley covered hip.
“Ronald, I’d like to hear a few breaths before we eat breakfast today.” She inserted into her ears the earpieces of a stethoscope that always hung around her neck. I could sense the mouse family rejoicing that I had been dull enough to leave two more Pop Tarts out for them to thieve.
I slowly breathed against the cold metal end of Diane’s stethoscope, keeping a watchful eye on the toaster, like I could will away the miscreants. I heard a scratching in the wall behind me.
“Diane, we have got to get those out of the toaster now,” I urged her. She chuckled at me, like she has a tendency to do. She thinks I worry too much.
“Okay, okay, I am all set, I think you just have some mucus buildup, we’ll get you something for that with your morning meds.” I stared at her silently from under my bushy eyebrows. I wondered when I had gotten them trimmed, last. “Grab your Pop Tart,” she sighed good naturedly, helping me up from the short, plastic seat. “And you should go in and watch TV with Betty, this morning, while you eat. She found A Charlie Brown Christmas on a channel.”
I burned my fingertips pulling my Pop Tarts out and setting them on the plate, and decided to watch the movie while they cooled down.
I sat down across the room in my favorite armchair. It contained crumbs of thousands of my Pop Tarts in its cracks and cushions. “You want to sit and eat with me?” Betty asked.
“I guess I do,” I answered. A short and portly man walked into the room still wearing his pajamas.
“Good morning, Eugene,” Betty greeted him. He waddled over to the other armchair, next to Betty’s end of the sofa.
“I already saw you once this morning,” he replied.
“Someone said you might have eaten my Pop Tarts,” I said to him. He stared at the TV, which was on commercial. “Hey,” I said a little louder. He looked over at me and I coughed from putting too much air through my now-crooked voice box. “You took my Pop Tarts.”
He nodded. “I had Pop Tarts for breakfast,” he said a little louder than he needed to. His tone angered me- he didn’t mind at all that he had thrown a wrench in my morning.
“Well they were mine,” I told him. Just then, Diane came into the room with tray of plastic cups full of our pills and other cups filled halfway with water.
“Luckily, everybody ate, so we don’t need to fight about who ate what.” She handed this Eugene his two cups first out of the three of us. “And if you’re still hungry, I’ll make you something else.” She took Eugene’s empty cups back and set them on the tray. Then she went to Betty, and then finally me. I expected that my throat would hurt when I swallowed, after being crushed and squeezed, but everything went down smoothly. She took the cups and carried the tray out of the room. I felt one of the Pop Tarts and found that it had cooled enough to eat.
I noticed Eugene watching me as I took my first bite. “What?” I asked him with a mouth full of warm strawberry filling and crumbly pastry.
“How is it?” he asked, licking his lips.
“Oh, you already know, you old creep,” Betty scolded him.