two stories
by J.B. Kalf
Eels
“He should’ve been here by now.”
“He’s still on his way from services, calm down. And put out your cigarette. It’s bad for the baby.”
Chino walked away from his wife and child so he could continue smoking. He puffed and puffed on this overcast Easter Sunday. However, he felt the eyes of his wife, and seemingly his baby Rudy, glaring at him. He squished out the cigarette next to a parked delivery truck and muttered into the face of his watch. He thought it lucky that watches didn’t have eyes; that anything without eyes was truly impervious to the pains of time. Yet Chino’s wife could not get enough of her baby Rudy’s eyes; she wondered why anyone would want to be blind.
A vintage cherry red fourth generation Thunderbird pulled into the back of the Chinese shopping market. Chino and his wife ran towards the car.
“You’ve taken so long! There’s only so long I can lie and say I’m on break! How am I going to explain to my boss?”
“Oh, thank God, Father Papas you’ve come! We prepared a tank just like you said! We don’t have much time, and Rudy isn’t as light as you last saw him!”
The large, obese man in a button up shirt one size too tight, clean Stacy Adams, prescription sunglasses on this cloud day, and a peacock feathered fedora, honked on his car horn. He was proud to embody the American Dream, thanks in part to the tithes he collected on Sundays. “I’m trying to park! Move! Move!” he yelled. But the parents wouldn’t move, instead moving around the car in unconsciously perfect tactical positions that would disrupt Papas’ parking.
The screaming and sudden baby crying and the horn honks from the Thunderbird brought the attention of the Chinese mart’s owner Deng from his workstation in the butchery. The business owner, slightly hunched and sporting an eyepatch and cutting knife, saw two of his workers yelling at a potential customer. He hopped off the delivery platform and began to yell while waving his knife.
“What do you think you’re doing? Easter and you’re both at this man! He’s come here to buy and you two slack!”
The parents of Rudy only noticed the knife and began to scream in tune to their child. They continued running around the Thunderbird while Papas continued to park, oblivious in his sunglasses, and Deng ran around waving the knife. Chino tried to calm down and reason with the apparently homicidal Deng through the Mandarin he had picked up at this job and local Chinese restaurants he had worked at.
Yuri, the sole Russian emigre working at Deng’s store, stood on the delivery platform while he ate a cha siu bun from the bakery inside. He enjoyed the show and wondered how easily this all could’ve been avoided if Deng had given the immigrant workers off for Easter Sunday like they had asked. But no, time is money, and Sunday would have a lot of customers. So, Chino and his wife schemed to have their baby christened in a freshly cleaned tank in the back of the shop emptied of the sea animals they typically sold inside or to neighboring restaurants.
But as Yuri looked around the back, the only tank he found filled with water was still occupied by black eels. The eels in their black mass of tangled, writhing bodies appeared to have no eyes to see but instead moved as one. Yuri looked at the waters and wondered if Chino and his wife planned on dunking their child into these waters to temper their child — baptism by water snake.
Yuri rubbed his eyes and continued looking at the eels. Only in sleep would his eyes have a chance to rest and see clearly. For now, he had to get back to his work shift and mind his own business. He swallowed the rest of the bun and went inside.
An Oneida Fork
He had called me in the office during my lunch break. I was eating take out from the night prior, the white Styrofoam with the leftovers in it warping from the radiation in the microwave. The grease rising from the invisible rays within the box. I had brought a fork from home. I would throw out the container and keep the Oneida fork, washing it in the sink to take home and reuse.
My phone rang. I answered, and my husband simply said, “The house is on fire.”
He flicks the light switch on in the motel room. The ambushing smell of cigarettes and cockroaches. I maintain that cockroaches have a smell — regardless of the radiation the insects must have a smell to recognize each other in the fallout of civilization. He says something about the length of a honeymoon phase, how soon we’re back in a hotel room after just buying a house. The pillows aren’t yellow-stained, but the wallpaper has these little flowers.
After chatting a bit with my husband about the house fire, I sat in the break room and ate the leftovers. I didn’t want my food to go cold. I only found out later that you’re supposed to wet the rice a little before putting it in the microwave so it reheats better, fluffier. It wasn’t as bad as shards but the way the light landed in from the window only highlighted a fake sheen on the rice, making them look more like pellets than anything I was supposed to be eating. I covered up the rice with globs of orange chicken.
He yells at me from the shower and says that he’s taking a long time with a chuckle, filling in what he wants me to say to him. I’m sitting on the bed staring at the flowers on the wallpaper. On the petals and leaves are saturated butterflies, crickets, bumblebees. I’m thinking about taxidermy and its definitions and if these little pictures can be considered taxidermy. Edenic images and theories but the cockroaches are needed where there’s a village.
My husband is in the shower singing to himself to fill the dead air. He forgets to wash behind his ears. He’s taking up all the hot water. I’ll have to wait some time so I can wash my hair. I feel the grease and oils coming from scalp. So many different kinds of combs and yet people first used their hands in the times of cavemen. Intimate fingers becoming teeth and the palm becoming the main shaft of the comb. They combed and braided and how long until hot water was no longer a privilege but an expectation. The cavemen and the lice and the cockroaches surviving cold and heat.
I stroke my metal fork from earlier in the workday, and stare at the wallpaper garden, and feel the oils in my hair radiating off of me like a halo, the smell of smoke in the air and all around me the presence of insects.
Two prim women talked: about the web servers going down, clients getting snappy. I prodded at my orange chicken and ate the broccoli florets with a delicacy I hadn’t known since I avoided eating vegetables as a child. One adult day, you suddenly crave greens, and at that moment it was like a switch flicked inside me, and I grew disgusted at the little plants in my white box. It might’ve been the smell, perhaps? Things just don’t smell right after they’re reheated.
The women and the servers. The servers going down was a statewide issue, but I felt some responsibility. I was the IT person of the department, but there was nothing to do but sit and wait for things to get resolved. No code to revise or buttons to click. A silly government job where you sit and wait and the whole thing is sitting and waiting.
I stabbed my fork into the dish and the chicken made a weird squelching sound — it wasn’t fully cooked through. I ate the chicken anyways.
I sleep with the fork under my pillow, the fifth night in a row. Cars honking outside and doors slamming and the neighbor’s television blaring, but the fork offers some consistency. A delightful domestic totem. Reminisces of a past life. When I place my hand under the pillow though I forget the fork is there and prick myself a little with the miniature trident. I retract my hand and remember for the next hour before I prick myself again and again.
My husband asks if I’m asleep.
I tell him no.
He rolls over and puts his arm over my chest.
I stroke the back of his hand.
I can feel it behind me, pricking me as the hand reaches beneath my shirt and stomach fur. His other hand tries to tuck itself beneath my head, but it finds the fork instead.
What’s this.
It’s a fork.
He sets the metal fork on the nightstand and continues to reach around my waist, beneath my waist, and I can feel it behind me, rising, throbbing, stabbing. He is already hard at the softest touch, and I’m doing nothing but lying here, and he’s not even on top of me yet. The image and theory. My husband. Yes, that’s sweat beneath the oils in my hair radiating like a halo and he forgot to wash behind his ears and…
I can still smell the cockroaches, hear the crickets on the wall, taste the headlights on the cars. I am part of the hotel ecosystem, along with cleaning ladies and the teenage clerk and this ecosystem known as the hotel. No, I am an invasive species. Each guest a disruption to the habits of the hotel self-sufficiency.
Inside the room it’s dark. Outside bright. He’s stroking my flesh and humping me with his clothes on and he’s moaning and I’m looking at the fork on the nightstand and the way it catches the light and glistens.
I finished my lunch, washed my fork, and headed back to my cubicle where I make sure there is always work to do.
Photo J.B. Kalf
BIO: J.B. Kalf is currently slipping on ice. Has been published or is forthcoming within The Shore, Poetry Lab Shanghai, Petrichor, Roi Faineant, Prosetrics, Hot Pot Magazine, Does It Have Pockets, #Ranger, and elsewhere. Prefers limes to lemons and can be found on Instagram @enchilada_photo and Bluesky @enchilada89.