PARKER YOUNG / CHICKEN MARRIAGE SANDWICH
I decided to throw the chicken sandwich away but couldn’t bring myself to touch it, the first step in the throwing-away process proved impossible, so I sat there while it sat there too, me in my chair, the sandwich on my plate, both of us in the kitchen listening to my wife talk or cry softly in the bedroom, where I pretended to sleep every night but couldn’t for no reason, no reason at all. Where I covered myself in too many blankets every night and, instead of sleeping, thought about my career, which was a difficult task, it was hard to think about, because it didn’t exist. And now I had something else to think about at night, the end of my marriage, which was imminent. When I looked down, the sandwich had disappeared, a disturbing turn of events, because I couldn’t eat the sandwich and I couldn’t throw it away, and as a result I didn’t know where it could have gone or how. Don’t look, I thought, but I looked in the trashcan. No sandwich. I looked all over the floor. I opened the cabinets, I moved the groceries and tuppperware in the cabinets all around, from side to side, in search of the missing chicken sandwich. I couldn’t decide if I was still hungry, which meant I couldn’t decide if I had unknowingly eaten the sandwich. In the bathroom mirror, I examined my teeth for signs of chicken or bread or slaw or pickles. What I found in my teeth was small and green — unfortunately, it might have been lettuce from my lunch at work. Or else it was a bit of pickle from the chicken sandwich. The pickles added a nice crunch to the sandwich. Wait, I thought, how do I know that? Was it because I ate the chicken sandwich? Or did my wife say something about the pickles earlier? I wondered, is crunch an onomatopoeia, or do crunchy things only sound like the word crunch to me because I knew the word crunch? Have we confused the word with its referent? I looked at someone in the bathroom mirror. It was me. I was trying to decide if I should make myself throw up. How do you translate crunch into other languages? I was not confident I could recognize a regurgitated chicken sandwich. It might look too much like my lunch sandwich, which was ham. Plus, if I threw up now, it might make me hungrier later, and there was nothing to eat around here except for a chicken sandwich. If I could find it. Which I doubted. I had already spent too much time looking. The longer you look for something, the less likely you are to find it. Based purely on the math, we can conclude that a chicken sandwich becomes steadily more difficult to find over time. Perhaps it learns to self-camouflage. All I could do was dry heave. Perhaps a chicken sandwich can self-camouflage so effectively that it actually becomes something else, it transubstantiates, which is what makes it so difficult to find. I wasn’t hungry. But soon I would be. My marriage was over. I couldn’t imagine a future for my career, which meant my career was over. I thought of my mother and father. How had they dealt with this kind of thing? The end of life. But they never talked to me, or I never talked to them, so I didn’t know. I couldn’t find the sandwich, and that meant I couldn’t eat the sandwich. Don’t look, I thought. But the notion that eating the sandwich would save my marriage had already entered my head. Now I was willing to eat the sandwich because of this mistaken notion. If only I could find it. I swore to myself I would eat the sandwich if I found it. My mind was swimming with such ideas about the sandwich. My marriage sandwich. I knew it wasn’t a marriage sandwich, but I didn’t care. There is no such thing as a marriage sandwich, a sandwich which must be consumed in order to prolong your marriage. But I couldn’t rule it out completely, even if I couldn’t explain it. In writing, you’re not supposed to explain, you’re supposed to show. But show what? It was horrible to consider. Better to postpone showing as long as possible. But you can’t postpone forever, because when explanation fails, as it always must, it becomes a show. We’re always showing. I couldn’t stand to think any longer about the sandwich. All I had to do was walk into our bedroom and hold her hand. I could just stand there, holding her hand. I wouldn’t even have to lie down beside her. It was a short walk from the kitchen to the bedroom, maybe five steps. They were practically the same room. We lived in a small apartment. I sat at the table, unable to move, head in my hands. Asking myself, am I breathing? Trying not to think. She touched my shoulders from behind and I screamed.
Parker Young lives in Chicago. His debut short story collection is forthcoming from Future Tense Books in 2023.