*Shortlisted for Gooseberry Pie’s 2nd Annual Writing Contest
Photo by Ben McLeod on Unsplash
After a long overnight shift cleaning up shit and dispensing meds to cantankerous dowagers, I was in the bedroom trying to nap when the buttery, salty aroma of fresh popcorn wafted from the kitchen, making my stomach turn as I imagined my out-of-work husband and preteen son hunched over huge baskets overflowing with kernels, spilling onto the clean tile floor, popcorn crunching beneath my tired feet, the ones that are working overnight shifts for more money, and the storm that would hit when I barked at the two of them to clean it up.
My husband would swivel in his chair with a look of utter defiance while my tubby, pudgy-faced ten-year-old sat rapt watching sleek soccer players vie for a win as if he were one of them, except he wasn’t. He slouched in his chair beside his couch-potato father, watching others battle rather than giving it—or any other sport or competition—a try, while I asked myself why they couldn’t be like other fathers and sons, out in the sun on this beautiful Saturday, tossing a ball or building something with their hands, rather than sinking them into that greasy popcorn?
But no, this was what my sister would call an “Instagram Fantasy,” an idealized scene that would never happen; instead, as I entered the kitchen, my son, the child my husband talked me into keeping, and his popcorn-stuffed mouth greeted me with, “I had a dream about you,” which caused me to recoil as I imagined the field day his therapist would have when my son described his dream and kicked me about for the next hour.
As my son spoke, the entire Oedipal catastrophe unspooled—how he’d asked me for a sleepover and I’d declined (thank God)—while I looked to my husband for help, despite his eyes being on his phone, his fist full of popcorn, leaving me alone to question how long I would have to wait for that piece of my DNA to surface, the genes that adored hikes and sports, that pushed beyond limits, that must be locked in there somewhere beneath my son’s lethargy and the rolls of fat around his middle, a tiny, hard kernel of me, waiting patiently.
I looked at my son, hungering for that kernel to break out, but he just chewed, eyes on the screen, and for the first time ever, after all the years of waiting, I wondered if it was me who lacked the proper heat to help make that kernel pop.
Andrea Marcusa’s writings have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Moon City Review, Milk Candy Review, Citron Review, Gooseberry Pie and others. She’s received recognition in a range of competitions, including Smokelong, Best Microfiction, Cleaver, Raleigh Review,and Southampton Review and is the author of the chapbook “What We Now Live With,” (Bottlecap Press.) She’s a member of the faculty at The Writer’s Studio in New York City.
