A Snack in the Dark
by Lukey Martin
In the hard dark of the day’s first hour I collected the instruments of sandwich around me and assembled them according to their nature. Finally I cried, “It’s a Sandwich,” and it was. I placed the sandwich in the toaster oven, set it to high and retired to my bedroom (and my space heater) to more pleasantly occupy the minutes. The kitchen that night was the very fist of winter.
After a short while I returned to the kitchen to retrieve the food. The glass door of the toaster was opaque with steam. Though there was still a minute or so remaining on the timer I removed the sandwich from the heat of the oven. I didn’t want it to be burned. Looking back, it seems my haste was my great error. I opened the door and smoke from the toaster oven mixed with icy clouds of my breath.
by Lukey Martin
In the hard dark of the day’s first hour I collected the instruments of sandwich around me and assembled them according to their nature. Finally I cried, “It’s a Sandwich,” and it was. I placed the sandwich in the toaster oven, set it to high and retired to my bedroom (and my space heater) to more pleasantly occupy the minutes. The kitchen that night was the very fist of winter.
After a short while I returned to the kitchen to retrieve the food. The glass door of the toaster was opaque with steam. Though there was still a minute or so remaining on the timer I removed the sandwich from the heat of the oven. I didn’t want it to be burned. Looking back, it seems my haste was my great error. I opened the door and smoke from the toaster oven mixed with icy clouds of my breath.
Reaching through the fog I snatched the sandwich from the wire rack. Already its warmth was ebbing away. As I examined the sandwich I thought it seemed incomplete somehow. I muttered aloud, “This thing is in no way satisfactory.”
I was suddenly aware of the squalor of my surroundings. Wretched fluorescent light filled the air and beat against the yolk yellow walls. One of the glass panels was missing from the window. Water dripped from the ceiling. Several weeks worth of dishes were piled in and around the sink. The garbage was overflowing. The counter was stained with coffee and soy sauce and cigarette burns and God know’s what. I shuddered in the midst of it all, gripping the thing I had made with numbed fingers. A rat seized on the stillness and bolted out from behind the toaster oven. It fell down to the floor and scrambled across the kitchen, and departed through the broken window.
In that initial surge of disgust and disappointment the sandwich spoke for the first time. “Thank you, oh Creator, for saving me from that awful place. I feared I would burst into flame!”
I stared at the sandwich. I said nothing, though I knew it felt my gaze. I should have known what would happen next; Should have done the right thing right then, the natural thing, the humane thing.
“What am I?” asked the sandwich.
“You’re a sandwich,” was my reply.
“And what manner of sandwich am I?” I told the sandwich it was a grilled cheese but the answer was met with crisp silence. Sensing that mere generalities would be insufficient, I ventured an elaboration. “You are two slices of wheat bread, a slice of store brand swiss cheese, and some spaghetti sauce, toasted in that toaster oven. I may have taken you out too soon.” I started to ask it a question but the sandwich interjected, perhaps hearing a lie in my voice that I could not. “Who am I that I am both several things and one thing?”
I just don’t know, I told it. And I was suddenly visited by the strange thought that even though I still hate the crusts I no longer remove them, as though the moment I was able to do it myself it was no longer worth doing.
The sandwich continued, its confusion turning rapidly to indignation, “Where did my bread come from? And the sauce? Whence the cheese? How did all these things which compose my being come to be in this cold, grimy, harshly lit kitchen? What is this “store” you speak of?”
Damn it. I was too cold and too hungry and it was too late. The air between us stiffened. Next came revelation, righteous condemnation on its heels, all bitter and hollowed out by the imminent truth.
“I," bellowed the sandwich, "am cursed. To know and yet know nothing? The mistake of an ignorant fool child? You must be brought to bear. Listen now and weep at the misery you wrought when you made me!” The sandwich told me how the red glow and the heat had infused him with a sense of things. It spoke with trepidation about the terror of waking to the light. It whispered of shrouded yearning for kin and for places it did not know. There was a haunting awareness, both exhilarating and oppressive, of a separation from it knew not what. It marveled at dreams of a wider world, a seeable, tastable universe. Where, it wondered rhetorically, would it wake up tomorrow? Where had its component parts come from? What followed this existence? And the sandwich knew that it would never know. There were dreams and fantasies and tellable tales but they all brought it to the same certainty: the knowledge was beyond the knowing.
The sandwich spoke for several more minutes and would never have stopped speaking, for all it had was words. As I began to devour it, the sandwich informed me of the pain felt in each bite, not a screaming thing, but a distant bitter account of the loss of self, until the fatal bite, which severed the thing that made the sandwich a sandwich and all was a thick miasma in my churning mouth. I was suddenly filled with regret. The sandwich was already cold.
Lukey Martin lives in Asheville, North Carolina. This is his first published piece.
I was suddenly aware of the squalor of my surroundings. Wretched fluorescent light filled the air and beat against the yolk yellow walls. One of the glass panels was missing from the window. Water dripped from the ceiling. Several weeks worth of dishes were piled in and around the sink. The garbage was overflowing. The counter was stained with coffee and soy sauce and cigarette burns and God know’s what. I shuddered in the midst of it all, gripping the thing I had made with numbed fingers. A rat seized on the stillness and bolted out from behind the toaster oven. It fell down to the floor and scrambled across the kitchen, and departed through the broken window.
In that initial surge of disgust and disappointment the sandwich spoke for the first time. “Thank you, oh Creator, for saving me from that awful place. I feared I would burst into flame!”
I stared at the sandwich. I said nothing, though I knew it felt my gaze. I should have known what would happen next; Should have done the right thing right then, the natural thing, the humane thing.
“What am I?” asked the sandwich.
“You’re a sandwich,” was my reply.
“And what manner of sandwich am I?” I told the sandwich it was a grilled cheese but the answer was met with crisp silence. Sensing that mere generalities would be insufficient, I ventured an elaboration. “You are two slices of wheat bread, a slice of store brand swiss cheese, and some spaghetti sauce, toasted in that toaster oven. I may have taken you out too soon.” I started to ask it a question but the sandwich interjected, perhaps hearing a lie in my voice that I could not. “Who am I that I am both several things and one thing?”
I just don’t know, I told it. And I was suddenly visited by the strange thought that even though I still hate the crusts I no longer remove them, as though the moment I was able to do it myself it was no longer worth doing.
The sandwich continued, its confusion turning rapidly to indignation, “Where did my bread come from? And the sauce? Whence the cheese? How did all these things which compose my being come to be in this cold, grimy, harshly lit kitchen? What is this “store” you speak of?”
Damn it. I was too cold and too hungry and it was too late. The air between us stiffened. Next came revelation, righteous condemnation on its heels, all bitter and hollowed out by the imminent truth.
“I," bellowed the sandwich, "am cursed. To know and yet know nothing? The mistake of an ignorant fool child? You must be brought to bear. Listen now and weep at the misery you wrought when you made me!” The sandwich told me how the red glow and the heat had infused him with a sense of things. It spoke with trepidation about the terror of waking to the light. It whispered of shrouded yearning for kin and for places it did not know. There was a haunting awareness, both exhilarating and oppressive, of a separation from it knew not what. It marveled at dreams of a wider world, a seeable, tastable universe. Where, it wondered rhetorically, would it wake up tomorrow? Where had its component parts come from? What followed this existence? And the sandwich knew that it would never know. There were dreams and fantasies and tellable tales but they all brought it to the same certainty: the knowledge was beyond the knowing.
The sandwich spoke for several more minutes and would never have stopped speaking, for all it had was words. As I began to devour it, the sandwich informed me of the pain felt in each bite, not a screaming thing, but a distant bitter account of the loss of self, until the fatal bite, which severed the thing that made the sandwich a sandwich and all was a thick miasma in my churning mouth. I was suddenly filled with regret. The sandwich was already cold.
Lukey Martin lives in Asheville, North Carolina. This is his first published piece.
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