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Nora Wagner
Canned
Anthony accompanies me to the farmers market every Saturday, where he makes small talk with leathery men and women in sunhats, and I fondle piles of fruit. Even though I know the qualities of a ripe nectarine — deep red, with a slight give — ours are consistently bland. Still, I admire their stones, full of intricate grooves, like ant farms.
Back home, I offer Anthony one of the less mealy slices from the cutting board. Mere seconds of exposure to oxygen, and already disintegrating into brown mush. He responds by tipping his Del Monte can to me. “Heavy syrup!” the label promises.
“With a bowl of fresh produce next to us? We’re perverse,” I say, groping for a wedge. I choose one that is very yellow, with a blushing, wrinkled inside.
Anthony watches me chew and chew. “Good?” he asks.
“Good,” I say, and he beams.
I lick orange goo from my fingers, cloying and plasticky, yet with a faint, fruity undertone. As if the peach remembers how it once tasted, real and sweet.
#
All at once, cans begin to take over Anthony’s cupboards. Some seem normal: diced tomatoes, chickpeas, tins of tuna. Sweet potatoes, also bathing in “heavy syrup.”
Others are mystifying. Pork brains with milk gravy. Somehow, a loaf of white bread, with a shelf life of ten years. Whole peeled baby potatoes, which scare me more than the brains. They look like eyeballs without pupils, what you might find in an evil scientist’s laboratory.
I remove the freakiest cans and arrange them in a pyramid. “Babe,” I plan to say, once he arrives home from the grocery store. I hope that the cans, stacked like cheerleaders, will do the talking. Two years ago, Anthony had staged a similar scene: the empty vodka bottles he’d dug out of the recycling grouped in a menacing huddle on the table. What had he said? Danger to yourself. Addiction. Get help. Or else. I mouth the words, wriggle my fingernail beneath the push tab of a can of lamb tongues.
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Anthony has been sleeping on the loveseat most nights, supposedly because the bedroom is too hot. In order to fit, he must crunch his body into the shape of an uppercase-N. Rolling by his ear, a can shouts “ONE WHOLE CHICKEN!” I tread softly over to pick it up, stepping around the cans encircling him like a defensive fairy ring. Whole chicken? “There’s no way,” I say too loudly, causing him to stir. His eyes blink half-open. For a moment, he seems completely awake.
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In order to dispose of Anthony’s six can openers safely, I drive to the opposite end of the city. I especially like one of them, with a pearly finish and a sharp blade, which reflects my wan face back to me. They jingle in the backseat.
He replaces the missing can openers quickly, with screwdrivers, pocket knives, snaggly rocks (the trick is to rub vigorously until liquid starts to bead). I quietly watch him during meals, without an appetite. Our unspoken pact is not to acknowledge that 1) I trashed his things, 2) he won’t stop.
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I start to crave his absence. During the nights when he vanishes, I Google queries like “signs of mental illness?” and open up Grubhub menus for nearby liquor stores. Without ordering anything, I stare at the twinkling bottles and think about how easy it was for me to give up drinking when he asked. Or, scratch that: not easy at all. Really damn hard, with the awful night sweats, a never-receding headache, my shaky hands. But I did it, I think. I’m doing it.
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Anthony doesn’t come home for a week. I text him frantically for the first few days, then stop altogether. Three consecutive nights, I dream of him unscrewing my head from my body. He always does this gently, with two fingers braced against my nape, murmuring for me to breathe.
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The afternoon of the eighth unresponsive day, he sends me a message. So sorry babe. Things got hectic. Dinner tn? My hand, guiding a spoonful of peach yogurt to my mouth, falters. I have nearly finished the vanilla base, but there is still chunky jam at the bottom of the cup, like fish tank scum. Of course, I text back.
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Hot plates of food are waiting for me when I step inside our apartment. He has set the table with placemats, stuck two limp dahlias into an aluminum can. They would collapse, if their vase wasn’t so narrow.
“Grilled chicken and sausage gumbo,” he says proudly. The green beans look like slugs, the slices of sausage thick pennies. I can’t tell the chicken apart from the clods of rice.
Anthony watches me chew and chew. “Good?” he asks.
I try to swallow, but a crunchy shard refuses to move down my throat. Chicken bone, I think. Instead, I extract a piece of metal, shiny from my spit, serrated. I hold it in my palms. I try to read the fragmented yellow lettering, but it has dissolved into the soup.
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Anthony rattles a can at me whenever I pass him on the sidewalk. Despite pretending not to recognize me, he returns to the corner of my block, and the bench outside of our once favorite grocery store, which sells nectarines that taste like honey. I always drop money into his can. Sometimes, there is an inch of broth left. Once, a whole peach.
Nora Esme Wagner is a sophomore at Wellesley College. She lives in San Francisco, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in JMWW, Wigleaf, Milk Candy Review, Ghost Parachute, Lost Balloon, New World Writing Quarterly, Moon City Review, 100 Word Story, Bending Genres and elsewhere. Her work has been longlisted for Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel and the Prose Editor for The Wellesley Review.
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