Laurel stood over the stove, deliberately twisting a wooden spoon over a pan as she cooked for Gena. She tapped at the cube of butter skating across the black surface, leaving thick, cloudy tracks like a comet’s tail. When the butter had reached the other side and curled up into itself, Laurel would gently tip the pan backward. She listed to herself all the ingredients she had to prepare for Gena: butter, milk, sugar, cereal, oil. She cooked for her roommate a few times a week now; it was more of a job than anything else.
Gena was the kind of girl who careened through the apartment carelessly and sloppily like a child, telling awful, vulgar jokes, always eating and leaving candy wrappers and cups dusted with flakes of day-old wine. Still, she remained impossibly thin. She would eat pints of ice cream down to the cardboard while Laurel stared. “Have just a bite,” Gena would say laughing, a spoon wedged into the side of her mouth as she held the dark well up to Laurel, who would always refuse. It had been ingrained in Laurel that something so rich would never leave her. At the edge of sleep she would conjure thick wedges of food, but even in her dreams, she could not eat it. Its consequence too much inside it, the seed of a cruel joke that would play out on her frame. She could not feel herself unless her ribs lined up in stripes across her chest, assuring her she had some kind of human pattern. As she watched the butter melt, she saw it for what it really was: What was once wrapped carefully in wax paper now hissed with sprawling fat as all the sickness infused inside burned out.
When the golden liquid began to turn brown, Laurel turned off the flame. She took out her ingredients: a box of Gena’s Frosted Flakes, a carton of Gena’s milk. She took the pan slick with butter and tipped it into the cereal. She shook the box and dug around inside it with her hand, which emerged oiled and caked with the insides, like it had been inside something dead. She took the bag of sugar and poured into the milk. She cooked for Gena a few times a week now, creating her own kinds of jokes.
