About the author: Becky Mandelbaum is the author of The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in August, and Bad Kansas, which received the 2016 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the 2018 High Plains Book Award for First Book. Originally from Kansas, she currently lives in Bellingham, Washington. You can read more of her work at beckymandelbaum.com.
Algren Award-winning stories appear in the same form as they were submitted to the contest. Some feature minor editing for profanity designed to leave the author’s intent intact.
I entered the King Weenies contest on an otherwise normal evening in April. Wilson and I were at home, sprawled out on the futon we both secretly hated but which we’d paid for and so pretended to like. We’d just returned from Wilson’s annual department faculty reading; I was buzzed off free wine and feeling confident. The readings were always good, and this one was no exception—his program housed several famous writers whose work I genuinely admired—but attending them always felt like touring a sacred building that, under normal circumstances, I would never be allowed to enter. While Wilson and his peers sat in metal folding chairs, eagerly nodding and hmming along to their gods and masters, I stood in the back and quietly palmed cheese doodles into my face, my plastic cup of wine crinkling under my grip. I figured if they wouldn’t let me into their writing club, I was at least going to eat their doodles. “Don’t you think it’s rude to eat while people are reading?” Wilson had asked on the way home, to which I’d responded, “If they didn’t want people to eat the food, they shouldn’t have put it out.”
Now, brave with wine, I Googled: WRITING CONTESTS WITH PRIZE.
It was our New Year’s resolution, to submit to contests. We’d saved up $300 each and were allowing ourselves a year to gamble this sum on submission fees. After months of form rejection letters, I found myself drawn to the fringes of the literary contest world. Not only were the submission requirements more fun—Send us two pages about why you love LEGOs and one winner will have their likeness turned into a LEGO person! —but they were also typically free to enter. This was important, as I’d blown all my money in January, propelled by a frenzy of ego, high hopes, and incorrect astrological readings.
Wilson, per usual, had been more discerning. As far as I knew, he had yet to enter a single contest. “There’s nothing worth sending to,” was his reasoning. What this meant was that all the contests I’d submitted to—and hadn’t won—were beneath him.
“Look at this,” I said, showing him the King Weenies website.
He was reading a book, but glanced over for a microsecond. “Hot dog eating contest?”
“You don’t even have to eat anything. You just write an essay and then, if you win, they send you free hot dogs for the rest of your life.”
“What if you die two days after you win?” This was his brand of question precisely, always somewhere to the far north of the actual conversation. Wilson Land, I called it.
“Lucky for King Weenies, I guess.”
He shook his head and mumbled, “Late stage capitalism.”
I spent the next hour feverishly composing an essay about my love of hot dogs. It was a sarcastic manifesto filled with hyperboles and invented anecdotes—”hot dog” was my first word as a child. The iconic American snack was also the last thing my beloved grandfather, a hero of World War II, requested on his deathbed, the nurse blending it and feeding it to him through a straw—and which I titled, “The Dog Days Are Not Over!” I didn’t even bother to proofread.
“How much you wanna bet I win?” I asked as I hit send.
Wilson kept his eyes on his book, the last of the Elena Ferrante trilogy. “How about a lifetime supply of buns?”
“Har-har,” I said.
Running under the surface of this exchange was the fact that Wilson was a strict vegetarian. Over the years, we’d learned to manage our dietary differences. Mostly, he would eat one thing, I’d eat another. There is a particular sadness in watching someone eat a more delicious meal—there’s probably a word for it in German or Portuguese but the closest we’ve got is FOMO, a word as bland and unappetizing as the unseasoned tofu Wilson ate whenever I brought home cheeseburgers for myself.
The problem was that he had grown up on a hog farm and suffered residual guilt about the innocent blood his father shed in the name of profit. He would often speak of his father’s pigs as if they were his childhood friends, which perhaps they were. That flight attendant looks just like Flannery, he’d say, laughing to himself. That lazy pig could eat a pumpkin in five minutes flat. Meanwhile, I’d be half-way through a ham sandwich, nodding along.
Despite our differences—and there were many—we had wonderful, atheletic sex and could talk for hours about nothing. We were best friends and had agreed, should it ever come to it, that we would give the other whatever was needed—a kidney, bone marrow, permission to sleep with others. There was a time period of many years when I loved him more than I loved myself.
“Do you want to enter it, too?” I asked him that night. “We’d double our chances.”
He offered a condescending smile, as if I were a child who’d offered him a worm. “No thank you.”
Two weeks later, I received an email with the subject line: WINNER, WINNER, WEENIES FOR DINNER. Both humorous and poignant, wrote the judge, who was, to Wilson’s dismay, some fancy New York writer with many literary prizes under her belt.
“Do you think she actually read it?” was Wilson’s question. He wore a look of unamused envy. “Or maybe nobody else entered?”
“Have you entertained the idea,” I said, “that my writing was exceptional?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Where are we going to put them? We don’t even have a freezer.”
About this he was right. The Seattle tech boom had forced us into a 500-square-foot mother-in-law in the backyard of a proper house. The homeowner was an Amazon web designer several years our junior whom we referred to as Geezie, for Generation Z. Our house had a hot plate, a microwave, and something Geezie called a micro-fridge. Most of our meals came from food trucks or the dumpster behind the chocolate shop where I worked. Sometimes Wilson would steal whatever goodies the eternally kind receptionist put out for the English department—little cookies or plastic containers filled with pieces of yellow cake. Sometimes, if we were lucky, he’d get his hands on a whole cheese pizza. “Does stealing pizza make me a bad person?” he’d ask on these occasions. Every time, I’d shake my head dramatically. “Grad students are supposed to steal food. It’s their thing. Everybody knows that.”
We did a lot of moral gymnastics those days, each of us holding up a flaming hoop for the other to cartwheel through, knowing that, if we wanted, all we had to do was jostle the hoop to set the other on fire. For instance, we were borrowing, without permission, Geezie’s WiFi. “He can afford it,” we told one another. When we streamed movies at night, undoubtedly slowing the bandwidth in Geezie’s house, we’d shrug. “He looks at screens all day,” was Wilson’s reasoning. “We’re giving him a break.” Even on the carnivore front I felt vindicated, since I’d promised to go vegan when I turned thirty. “Everything in moderation,” I told him. “Except for love,” he replied.
Perhaps we thought our love was unbreakable. We met when we were writer-babies, both of us eighteen and goo-goo over the liberal college town in Kansas where we had moved to study English. Both of us were from conservative towns where people regularly quoted the bible and crammed their lawns with inflatable nativity scenes, the baby Jesus white as a grub. In Lawrence, people wore dreadlocks and rode bikes and read books in public. They knew how to eat with chopsticks and they did it, too, with confidence. People were openly gay. It was beautiful not to wear makeup. It was beautiful to be a writer, to fall in love.
Any writer knows there is danger in dating another of your kind. There is jealousy, yes, but there is also the sensation of having to witness, in another, all the icky self-absorption that roils in your own mind and which you work hard to keep bottled up, like a jar of hot pee you must carry with you everywhere. To date a writer is to crack open this jar and suffer the smell forever.
In college, I was the pet of the English department. I won all the prizes, sucked in praise like a black hole with leggings. In workshop, people would go quiet when I cleared my throat. Wilson, meanwhile, was the well-groomed farm boy, exceedingly bright and quick-tongued but, at the end of the day, too gentle and ordinary-looking to illicit much attention. Case in point: he still had a bowl-cut at twenty. Under these conditions—me in the spotlight, him eager to dip a toe inside—we fell in love. At the time, I didn’t know how pretty I was, or that sometimes men, even professional, rational ones, confused prettiness with talent.
For a few years after college, Wilson and I stayed in Lawrence and worked in restaurants. These were happy days, both of us poor and tired but extremely well-fed. We ate like kings, our evenings a parade of oily Styrofoam boxes and Rolling Rocks. We wrote in the mornings, drinking coffee and eating day-old scones. We felt Parisian, although we’d never been to Paris or even out of the U.S. Neither of us sent out work or had much pride in what we were doing, but it didn’t matter. Our twenties and thirties stretched ahead of us, an empty vessel into which success and glory would undoubtedly pour.
Graduate school had always been the unspoken end-goal, but when the time came, it felt too sudden. At least to me. I don’t think Wilson felt this suddenness. He was itching to move somewhere where people might love him more than they did in Lawrence. We both applied to the same ten programs, figuring we were bound to get into at least one together. Instead, Wilson got into four schools and I got into none. He chose Seattle not because it was his preference, but because he thought we’d be happiest there. That I could find a job. That I could entertain myself by hiking and sampling exotic seafoods. It was meant to be a selfless gesture, but felt, instead, like a great unkindness.
By the time of the weenies, my writing was all but dead—my New Year’s resolution to submit work was nothing if not a final hurrah. I had a secret novel stashed away on my computer that I sometimes pecked at, but otherwise I’d given up. At some point I’d stopped writing sentences in my head, which is how I knew I was done for. Gone was the ghostly voice who had always, without my permission or training, applied a steady narration to my life, arranging and rearranging sentences for maximum rhythm, clarity, and sarcasm. I didn’t see the use in waking this voice up. Let her rest, I told myself. The old gal’s earned it. I also feared I couldn’t wake her up—that she had truly, once and forever, gone silent.
Meanwhile, Wilson had become a writer. A real one. When people asked what he did, he would respond, without irony of self-deprecation, “I’m a writer.” When people asked me, I told them the truth, that I worked in a chocolate shop. Oh, I love chocolate! they all cried, as if chocolate were an underground Prog rock band nobody else had ever heard of. I found it both funny and painful, that people were more excited about my shitty cashier job than they were about Wilson’s writing. Suddenly I was on the other side of things, in the world of people who would rather eat chocolate and watch Netflix than find the perfect metaphor. It was a kinder world, but it was not the one I wanted.
Well, so what? If you can’t be a writer, isn’t the next best thing to love a writer, to be his muse? The answer is: of course not. It’s actually the worst thing. But there I was. There we were. Then came the weenies.
The first installment arrived on the hottest recorded day in Seattle since 1897. That afternoon, great circles of moisture discolored the fabric under Wilson’s arms. He had a stack of papers to grade and had just gotten a parking ticket. The day before—the very first day of wearing sandals, normally a celebratory day—he’d stubbed his toe on a curb and the nail had turned black as licorice. Crankiness radiated from him like cartoon bolts of lightning.
When the doorbell rang, I watched the vein on his forehead pulse.
“I’ll get it,” I said, and opened the door to a middle-aged woman in cargo shorts and a red KING WEENIES visor.
“Congratulations,” she barked, a bead of sweat traveling the ridgeline of her nose. “Here is your very first box of King Weenies all-beef kosher hot dogs.” She presented me a cardboard container the size of a kitten’s coffin, stamped with the King Weenies logo, a Band-Aid-colored hot dog curved into a smile with pickles for eyes and a mustard crown.
“Is there something I need to do?” I’m not sure what I had expected—a camera man? A contract? A tall man in a tuxedo?
“Just enjoy the weenies,” she called.
“And you’ll bring more next week?”
“Same day, same time.”
“What if want to skip a week?” I asked, but by then she had already turned to leave.
Inside, Wilson was holding a beer to his forehead. “This student thinks Jane Austin wrote Wuthering Heights.”
“Does the goodness of humanity depend upon her knowing the difference?” This was a question he sometimes posed when I decried the stupidity of strangers.
He narrowed his eyes. “Are those them?” he asked, gesturing to the weenies.
I nodded.
“What are you going to do with them?”
“I thought I’d hang them from the ceiling fan and watch them twirl.”
He returned to his grading, his red pen pressed and bleeding onto the paper. “So you know, most hot dogs contain lips, organs, and something called pink slime.”
“You’re thinking of pork hot dogs,” I said. “These are beef.”
He looked up at me, his eyes pink and tired. “Do cows not have lips, Danielle?”
Perhaps I should mention that I did not particularly like hot dogs. They bothered me. Once, when I was ten years old, my parents hosted a Super Bowl party and invited a small group of friends and family to watch. I was enjoying a Capri Sun in the kitchen when my uncle, a balding divorce attorney from Kansas City, sauntered in. Without much fanfare, he ate a potato chip, filled a glass with tap water, and then positioned an uncooked hot dog against his crotch. He jiggled it wildly in my direction, wagging it back and forth, up and down, his eyes locked on my own, his tongue peeping out from the corner of his pale mouth. The other adults were in the adjoining living room, drinking beers, mesmerized by the football game. The scene ended when the hot dog broke in half. The circumsized piece of wiener hit the linoleum and bounced in a great arc, landing next to my mother’s foot. When she saw the fleshy object lying there, she picked it up with pinched fingers, as if lifting a mouse by its tail. She looked around the room, eyes filled with astonishment, until her gaze landed upon my uncle. With the force of someone uncorking a bottle of champagne, she erupted in laughter.
That first week, I ate all ten hot dogs. One might think I was trying to prove something to Wilson, but they would be wrong. Aside from a $10 scratch-off, I had never won anything before. This was the first true bounty my writing had ever earned me. I was determined to enjoy it.
For lunch, I would put a wiener in a bun and top it with relish, ketchup, and mustard. For dinner, I ate them as a kind of side-dish, dunking the meat into my mashed potatoes. One night I whipped up a pot of beans and weenies, a dish my mother used to make when I was a little girl. The baked beans, to Wilson’s dismay, came with little chunks of bacon. “When you eat two animals at the same time,” he said, “only the soul of one can escape. The other remains trapped inside your body forever.”
“Says who?” I asked, shoveling the dead animals into my mouth.
“God,” he said. “And science.”
I rolled my eyes but secretly hoped it would be the pig’s soul that stuck around. They were smart, could save people from housefires. The females enjoyed a clitoris located inside of their vagina. Cows, on the other hand, depressed me. All that mooing and lying in the rain. Standing there while someone tugged their udders. Udders.
“Would you like a taste of soul?” I asked, hovering the spoon before Wilson’s pinched lips.
“Stop it.”
“Come on,” I said, still circling the spoon. “A little protein never hurt.”
He pushed my wrist away. “It’s not funny, Danielle.”
I shrugged, trying to conceal the spike of shame that bolted through me. “I’m just playing around.”
With this, he got up and left the table, leaving his plate of twiggy leaf litter behind.
As the novelty of my victory wore off, the taste of hotdogs became more and more unbearable. It was like eating a cartoon campfire, or chewing an orangutan’s buttcheek. By the third week, when the frumpy weenie woman returned, an uneaten hot dog remained in the micro-fridge. By the next week, there were two. And so on and so on, until it was officially Wilson’s summer break and the first leftover hot dog had turned a putrid shade of green. Rather than throw it away, Wilson put the weenie on my favorite plate—a creepy porcelain dish painted with the silhouette of a 19th century child—and placed it on my pillow with an index card that read: This is your mess, deal with it.
Things took a sharper turn in August. Another hot day, the temperature slipping casually into the 90s. I was sitting at the kitchen table working a crossword, sweat pooling under my thighs. Wilson had recently subscribed to The New York Times so that now, each morning, a bundle appeared in a plastic blue container some agent of the paper had discreetly installed beneath the mail box. Every morning, with no shortage of pomp or gravitas, Wilson would unsheathe the paper and settle into his reading stance, ankle resting on knee. He would start at the beginning and work his way inward, clicking his tongue or scoffing at random intervals, his eyebrows hyperbolically narrowing or lifting. Like a madman, he left the funnies and puzzles untouched. On my days off, after he headed to campus to teach his summer courses, I would swoop in and conquer what I thought of as the proletariat section.
I was stuck on a clue in the Friday puzzle when Wilson walked in, hours earlier than I was expecting him. His forehead shimmered with sweat, and he had the clammy look of a frog, as if he might, at any moment, expectorate a cloud of flies.
“Something happened today,” he said, a strange smile on his lips.
I put down my pen. “That’s typically the nature of existence.”
Still smiling, he went to the refrigerator to retrieve a bag of edamame, ignoring the newest stack of uneaten weenies. He poured the edamame into an orange bowl and set it on the table before me.
“Well?” I asked, plucking a pea from the bowl.
He sat down beside me, knees bobbing. “I won a prize,” he said, and then proceeded to name the prize, which was a very well-known and prestigious award that many famous writers had received.
The news fell over me like a curtain. Part of the prize, I knew, was book publication. He was going to have a book. I knew he’d been working on a novel, but I had no idea it was finished. No matter how many times he brought it up, I never asked to read it. I was afraid of how good he’d become. Perhaps he understood this, because he never explicitly offered to let me see it.
“I didn’t know you entered,” I said. What I wanted to do was cry, but I ordered my face to convey happiness.
“I was embarrassed to tell you. I never thought I’d actually win.” He smiled again, and I noticed it was a particular flavor of smile I hadn’t tasted since college.
I adjusted in my seat. “Do you see how that’s sort of hurtful?” I asked gently. “That you assumed I would judge you for having ambition?”
“I don’t see how it has anything to do with you.”
I popped a pea into my mouth, sucked the salt off the pod. “We’re a unit,” I said. “Everything you do has something to do with me.”
“I’m pretty sure this doesn’t.”
I could only stare at him, my heart a tightly clenched fist. I had planned to ask him about the crossword clue, but now I was afraid he’d know the answer.
Later that night, in bed, Wilson lay on his back, studying the ceiling.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
For a minute he lay there, breathing. “You didn’t even say congratulations.”
“Oh,” I said, guilt filling my belly, heavy and cold. I am not a monster. He was my person, and he wanted me to be proud of him, and I was, wasn’t I? I could detect a germ of pride tucked very deep inside me, a tiny candy heart surrounded by poisonous metal spikes. “Congratulations,” I said. “I’m happy for you. Really.”
He turned away from me, showing me the great blank page of his back. “It doesn’t seem that way,” he said.
“Well, it’s true. I’m not sure how else to convince you.”
“Just forget it—I’m tired.”
I turned from him, so that our backs were facing one another. “You didn’t say congratulations when I won the King Weenies contest,” I said. There was a tone in my voice, of a toddler demanding that everyone call her a pretty pretty princess.
“You won hot dogs, Danielle.”
After this, humming with hurt, I pretended to fall asleep.
Not speaking in a 500-square-foot home is difficult, but we managed it expertly that week. Every time I looked at Wilson he was smiling. Many times per day he would step outside to call someone and tell them about the prize and his forthcoming novel. These were mostly our friends from Kansas, and I knew they would be surprised to hear that Wilson had a book coming out before me. Once upon a time, I was the writer. More than a few teachers—all of them male—had told me they’d look for my name in a bookstore someday.
We hadn’t spoken for three whole days when Wilson saw the latest package of weenies in the trash. “You didn’t even open these,” he said, retrieving the weenies and wagging them at me.
“I don’t want to eat them.”
“Then give them to someone who does.”
“What’s it matter to you what I do with them?”
“It’s wasteful,” he said. “Animals died.”
“So what? They’ll be dead if I eat them and dead if I don’t.”
He frowned at me. “Who are you, even?”
“I’m the person you’re supposed to treat kindly.”
He set the weenies on the counter. “Danielle, what’s wrong? Are you jealous?”
That word, the J-word, had never come between us before. Now it bloomed there, a cactus so monstrous neither of us would be able to circumnavigate it to get to the other. “If I were jealous,” I said, “it would mean I wanted to write like you, which I don’t.”
His mouth twitched. “That is a hurtful thing to say.”
“Is it? You’re not jealous of my hot dogs because you don’t want to eat them.”
“Who says I’m not jealous of your hot dogs?”
I stared at him. “You’re saying you’re jealous of my hot dogs?”
“No,” he said, “but it never even occurred to you that I might be. And that’s the problem. You don’t consider my side of things. Everything is a reflection of you.”
I could only balk at this. “On your side of things, you’re in school,” I said. “You’ve won a prize. You’re going to have a book.” I breathed. It was hot in the house and I could feel a bead of sweat entering my butt crack. “On my side of things, there are hot dogs and nothing else.”
“There’s me,” he said, sadly. “You have me, Danielle.”
For a moment we stood there and stared at one another. The hot dogs were still on the counter, listening. I said, “I want to read your book.”
Wilson stared at the hotdogs. Then he nodded. “Okay.”
It was titled, You Are My Here. I liked the title but didn’t tell him this. I read the first page and liked it, and then read the first chapter, and liked it even more. It was terribly, painfully good. The main character, Warren, was obviously Wilson, a young man who leaves his father’s pig farm and falls madly in love with a girl who was obviously me. Her name was Delia. We even had the same birthday, Delia and I, but in the book, it’s Delia who goes on to be a famous writer, and the narrator, Warren, who happily trails in her shadow as she travels the country, attending writing residencies and touring for her first novel, which is a smashing success. All the while, Warren scribbles in his little leather-bound journal, detailing their days together.
As I read, I recalled how, once, in a workshop in college, Wilson accused my prose of being verb-based. Your characters are constantly dashing around, moving from room to room, eating and sleeping and whimpering and gazing dramatically into one another’s eyes. (The instructor, who once invited me to accompany him on an overnight trip to Omaha, had defended my writing, calling Wilson’s observation curious but ultimately incorrect.) Now, reading Wilson’s book, I noted that the prose was noun-based. Delia and Warren were constantly eating food—French toast with raspberries and whipped cream, hardboiled eggs sprinkled with salt, warm baguettes slathered in cinnamon butter and honey. They stayed in hotels with heavy comforters, basil-scented shampoo, and air conditioners that dripped water and hummed like sleeping monsters. Delia wore sheer blouses, bangles, and espadrilles. In her hair was a silver beetle clip with turquoise stones for eyes. I realized all of these nouns were my nouns—my favorite foods, the things I loved about hotels. I wore sheer blouses and espadrilles, and had inherited my grandmother’s turquoise barrette. Not once had I considered that Wilson took note of these details. What were his details, I wondered? His nouns? His adjectives? I had never written about him in such a way, and this discrepancy made me very sad. I realized that if I ever wrote a story about him, the reader probably wouldn’t even know what he looked like.
At the end of the novel, Delia falls in love with another famous writer named Alberto. She leaves Warren so she and Alberto can go off and be famous together. Heartbroken, Warren returns to his childhood home to discover his father is very sick with cancer. He decides, then, to sit down and write about his life—his love and loss of Delia, his father’s illness, the pigs. The very last paragraph of the book reads: I had no idea whether I’d written something great or terrible. I wanted Delia to read it and tell me, but then she would discover my father had died and might take pity on me. I didn’t want pity. What I wanted was a book. When I put the manuscript in the mailbox, 300 pages bound with a red rubber band, addressed to some fancy building in New York City, I wondered if maybe there was no such thing as bad writing, just a mismatch of writer and reader, the same way it happens with a love gone wrong. The love itself is never at fault—that is not the nature of love. The problem is always the people. Then I closed the mailbox and this thought disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. There was much to do. My father’s unopened bills beckoned from the kitchen counter. His bed was unmade. His hogs, blissfully lazing in their pen, had not yet had their breakfast.
I finished the book in one sitting. I read it outside, on the chair whose sticky rubber slats left red stripes on my thighs. I was drinking lemon water and when I returned inside, as if into a new house, my mouth tasted sour and the skin on my shoulders was pink and hot. Wilson was reading on the couch. He’d long ago finished the Ellena Ferrante and had moved on to a tome called A Little Life. On the cover was a man’s face in agony. At night, once, I heard Wilson weeping over it. I didn’t dare ask what it was about.
When I walked in, bringing the hot outdoor air with me, Wilson lifted his gaze. His eyes were blue but sometimes appeared gray. Now was one of those times.
“All done,” I said.
“You’re red as the devil. Did you forget sunscreen?”
I could tell, by this deflection, that he was nervous for my response. That he cared about my opinion, in the face of what was obviously a far more beautiful book than I would ever be able to write, made me feel heavy with a power I didn’t exactly want anymore. It also made me sad, as if the cactus that had grown between us had suddenly sprouted a layer of beautiful flowers, and it was these flowers, despite their fragrant softness, that would ultimately keep us apart.
“Wilson,” I said, holding up the pages and sort of shaking them. “It’s wonderful.”
For a moment his face seemed on the verge of bursting open, like a Jack-in-the-box, but just when I was certain it would unfold with pleasure, he pursed his lips, sucked all the joy back into his face, and nodded curtly. “I’m glad you liked it.”
“I loved it. Although the ending made me sad.”
“Because the father dies?”
“Because Delia and Warren don’t end up together.”
He frowned. “Oh, right. Well.” He looked over to the corner of the room, where his books were stacked in towers. For some reason, despite our millions of books, we had never bought a proper bookshelf. “They were doomed from the beginning,” he said. “I figured most people would see that in the first sentence. The rest of the novel is a fulfilment of that sentence.”
Curious, I glanced at the manuscript. The first sentence read: I once loved a woman so thoroughly I began to erase myself. It occurred to me then that he did not see the dissolution of Delia and Warren as the book’s central tragedy. Maybe he didn’t see it as a tragedy at all, but rather as the catalyst for Warren’s development, the moment he transformed from boy to man. Under this light, Delia wasn’t a character at all. She was a stepping stool, or a mirror.
“Are you hungry?” I asked Wilson, desperate for a distraction. It was evening now, dinner time.
His eyes were back on his book. “I already ate, actually.”
Had he looked at my face, he would have seen that my feelings were hurt, but he wasn’t looking, and so he saw only the words in front of him. Words someone else had written.
Quietly, I turned and went into the kitchen. The room hummed with light and heat, the smell of bread and rotting bananas and the lemons I had cut for my water, a pair of flies now buzzing around the fruit’s waxy husk. Making sure the surface was clean, I placed Wilson’s manuscript on the butcherblock, title-side up. I was not exactly hungry, but I went to the refrigerator to retrieve some hot dogs. With care, I arranged five of them on a plate and put the plate in the microwave, where they twirled like dead ballerinas. They emerged steam-slicked and warm, tiny fissures in their skin from where the heat had broken them open. I ate one, then two, then three. Without condiments, nearly gagging. Still, there were more on the plate, in the refrigerator, in the trash. They were unappealing and unrelenting and completely mine. There were more on the way tomorrow.
