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Waffle by Jackson Pappin

Even asleep I was feeling superfine. Though I forgot I was away from home while I sat up, I guess I was untroubled by the dark. Moments after I saw the sherbet slivered light underneath the door, I cussed viscously under my breath, immediately after slamming into a cat scratching post and stubbing three of my left toes. Guzzling oxygen and unsuccessfully muffling my pain, the stuffy bedroom became familiar, though the space was still cloaked in shadow and darkness. A robust residual funk—beautifully flush and foul and sweaty—hung in my nostrils, and I thought, “no amount of stumbling would squander my updated charisma.”That morning, Hannah was off at work already. So I was all alone inside the house her parents bought after they sold their cabin at the lake. Just last night Hannah and I embarked on our third sexual rendezvous, which as it so happens, was by far the most casual. Seeking my jeans, I spotted my furry moccasin slippers. I swear I wear mine more than any other pair of shoes.

As I slipped my throbbing toes into the fuzz, I discovered they were on backwards. Nothing was worth the worry though, I was winning with women for once. When a woman like Hannah initiated a date with me back in college, I was ecstatic. When she initiated a date two weeks ago, I was intrigued, though somewhat cautious. Hannah wanted nothing with me, for me, from me, in college.

But past-twenty-five Hannah was morphing and climbing in her adventurous spirit, it was “no bras after five,” and with both electric blue eyes alive, she said, “I am striving and driving toward exotically odd nights like a moth craving a lamp light.”
“So I’m the light at the end of the tunnel?” I asked, seconds inside her front door the first time.
“Well yes, if you believe a long term relationship is a sacrificial act of faith,” she said in between passionate kisses and pulling my jacket off my shoulders while unbuckling my pants.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Exactly,” she said, then her chest melted into mine, and her lower back coiled into a simmering swerve, and her frenetic finger tips eagerly tugged my zipper down, while she removed her sheer sleek blouse.

My feet were immediately sweaty in my moccasins, so I slipped them off while I finally found my pants, wadded beside my shirt and jacket, and of course my toes again stuck against the elastic denim when I pulled the legs on. What a lame struggle. But I was still pleased that this minor inconvenience was the extent of my misery lately, because things in my life were mostly looking up. I felt dangerously optimistic, with joy as a foe.

I never got a good look at the room before that morning. Then I finally saw all four eggshell white walls with the lights on when I found a switch and threw open the door. I was only a little bit distracted the other nights. I noticed a gold framed picture of Hannah and her perfect mouth grimaced at the messy bedspread I left unmade. I smirked at my bed headed hairdo and smoldering glazed expression reflected in the slender body length floor mirror.

Hannah’s job title eluded me as I took my time scanning the hallway. My memory was failing and embattled with the numbed pricks and scintillating skewers splitting my head apart. These were the first spikes of a hangover headache. I swore she told me her current position involved some sort of social marketing ploys, hacking target market demographics, for—what was it? Oh, yeah—this virtual reality software startup located in the blossoming urban south shore of the city’s lake. I was on a liquored sabbatical, as a charming mooch: a couchsurfing social climber with dignity. But I would never slap the unsavory label of a full blown gold digger onto myself.

“The initial burning elation of liquor will never become virtualized like the rest of existence,” I said out loud, cynically criticizing Hannah’s career, as the sound caromed on and then back from the miniature marble columns marking the entrance of Hannah’s cavernous kitchen.

“You can make yourself whatever you want,” I remembered her saying before she left for work. She possessed a self assured demeanor which seemed beyond my reach. Hannah’s narrow alabaster face and electric blue eyes demanded my secrets. She removed the frames and unintentionally cloaked the lower portion of her sharp jaw and thin aquiline nose with luscious platinum Rapunzel curls and waved me a twinkled finger fan goodbye. Ten feet from my dreams, she was vividly ethereal and almost angelic.

“Don’t mind if I do,” I said into the over-embellished stainless steel echo chamber, hours later.

Five steps inside the hardwood floors in the kitchen I stopped and caught a whiff of the perfume she wore. Maybe spiced with pheromones, because the scent licked my nose with a similar intrigue earlier that morning too, right before I fell asleep again, driven by the inertia incurred through exhaustion after four rounds of sex. (Ok, so it was only a double feature, but still, not a bad nightcap.) Hannah’s scent was all around this kitchen, maybe in the air conditioning, and I decided then that in light of this revelation, Hannah was officially my savior of the senses. As a pink clouded poetic lover, I would tell her later, because she loved that sappy stuff.

The marble counter top was Hannah’s flavor, naked and unafraid, in the oddly bright spilling light of late morning leaking inside the glass. Most winters around there were gray and gloomy. She left a purple sticky note beside an enormous white bottle of Advil that said, “Save some for me.” The bottle’s shadow reminded me of the headache forming, adding mass, gaining weight, absorbing my attention. Hannah always said the best bedtime story was a wakeup call. I rubbed my head and then my stomach, at the same time, in opposite directions, as I swallowed seven Advil tablets without water. I could do anything.

I cracked the freezer door open and discovered an unopened golden box of Buttermilk Eggo Waffles. As I slid the chrome tab down the side of the reflecting surface of the toaster, Hannah’s cat, Macy Gray, approached me, slinking along the countertop. I am a dog person. I typically hate cats, though feeling grateful and compassionate, I let the feline fondle the loose top of the Advil bottle undisturbed. A second cat, Donald Glover, approached Macy Gray from the opposite end of the marble countertop, apparently wanting a piece of the action Macy Gray found in the bottle top.

“So what, you guys just ignore the delicious waffles?” I sarcastically said to the cats.

Both Macy Gray and Donald Glover pawed the bottle top, and I heard a humming garage door opening. I checked the driveway, and assumed the drone was actually a heater, for the cats. My eyes refocused on Donald Glover’s back arching like a Roman aqueduct, before he swiped Macy Gray’s paw away from the inside of the Advil bottle. Macy Gray flipped out and twisted her head violently, a reflexive motion that batted the bottle and dumped the Advil tablets in a twelve-foot scatter pattern. Perfect, just perfect.

A single piercing ding noise alerted me and spooked Macy Gray and Donald Glover who leaped from the counter. My Eggo Waffles were finished, but their golden bodies were buried in the crevice of the yawing toaster cavern. Without thinking I reached for an immaculate fork in one drawer, and did not bother shutting it all the way, before I dug the chrome prongs inside the toaster, after, my sacred waffle sung its siren song spliced with magnetism.

I electrocuted myself and jumped back and bumped my head on a low hanging dining room light and the light bulbs shattered and in all the commotion broken glass fell inside my sweaty moccasin slippers before a self-inflicted wavelength of fury and manic rampage forced me into a fitful tailspin and I jumped around while ripping the moccasin slippers off my damaged feet before gathering momentum and hopping through the thin barrier of a mesh screen door. The cats nibbled on my Eggo Waffles, as my smug mug finally morphed into a gritty grimace once more. I drowned in a midnight blue funk while I studied the mess and drafted explanations, as I reluctantly plucked and pulled the shattered glass out from my fucking feet.

About the Author

Jackson Pappin is an author, journalist, and screenwriter from Seattle, Washington. He is 25, sober, and a journalism student at Washington State University.