Yellowstone Pizza and Internet Cafe
CChun Soon is eating raisin bran for breakfast. The raisins look white because they are sugared. The server who brought the Kellog’s Raisin Bran also brought a large basket of raw sugar, pure cane, and splenda. Splenda has been explained to me many times by my mother who insists it is sugar–but good. How did they get to her? A subliminal message? “Splendid?” The word itself reminds me of how Daisy and Jordan would describe their picnic. “I hope the pudding isn’t lumpy.”
“Oh, no, Daisy, darling. Everything is simply splenda. GOD it’s splenda!”
I have no appetite. I feel like vomiting. Chun Soon likes to order food, then talk about it, then attribute its weirdness to the state we are in. “Are all carrots in Montana square?” I call her three percent because I saw the results of her body fat test. “Hey three percent, you gonna eat that squarrot or giggle at it all night?” The best meal we have had so far is rice. I cooked it over the fire that Chun Soon had me make to cheer me up. That was our first night camping. It was the first campfire I have gotten to make on my own. This is because I have always been camping with boys who want to show me how. It’s easy peasy. I feel like throwing up. I am also very good at putting up our tent.
Reality has been one long, sick, moment since I left Casper. I measure it by remembering what has passed. Yesterday, I called my mom. I spent an hour smelling the incense in my sweater. Chun Soon and I saw geysers. My friend Bruce told me that a full scale erruption of Yellowstone would be the end of us. Chun Soon keeps me from a similar eruption. Her stories and philosophies are my thin crust over the scalding mud I feel running through my stomach, my chest, down into my arms, and out my eyes. “Keep talking,” I say. She said she’ll help me to be like Old Faithful who just erupts a little bit at manageable periods. When we saw Old Faithful, we cheered right before it erupted as if we were from a dimension where the sequence of events was accelerated. As we walked out, geyser blazing behind us, I said to the staring people, “Fine. And you?”
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