Bake Me Like One of Your Rough Puff Pastries | TJ Fuller

Fold me. Butter me. Freeze me. My blood panels are pending. My position is under review. I need to be worked.

Outside the tent and the television cameras, we slaver. Don’t look. Stay locked in on the competition. Don’t lose track of time. You are so attuned to each other, opened handed, rushing. I can be another person.

Out here smoke barbs the air. The fluorescents are loose. Instructions are even vaguer. In there the flavors overwhelm. Everyone is winking. You cry in front of each other. I cry alone, in traffic, in the bathroom, waiting for test results and performance reviews, waiting for a zipping, full-bodied feeling of purpose. To be called crisp or cracking. To believe it.

What if what if what if, I do the drowning myself. At least that’s what the therapist says. He is also too confident, only tasting and never baking, only judging and never being turned over and scratched and prodded and spread for the close up.

Fill me and shape me. Make me forget most of my body. Most of my body fails to hide the ache. Rising, bubbling, burning. Crunch in that fat fucking knife. See the center. How bad is it? Don’t tell me.

I will always be outside the tent. In the smoke, on the couch, in traffic, tangled in a hospital bed, trying to sleep among the monitors. I deserve whatever comes. Worse. In there you say the same. Do you believe it? Do I?

We could cheat our bodies, our bills, our resumes. Forget them. Forget to-do lists and self-help apps and a work-life balance. Forget judgment—theirs and ours. We don’t need to know. We could savor, devour.

I might be jobless and dying or celebrating my cost-of-living raise and my functioning kidney or somewhere in between, somewhere that requires daily attention, management, mindfulness—pill organizers and software shortcuts and digital signatures and follow-up appointments. Or I might be flaky and layered and sweet. Opened up by you. Ready to be shared.

TJ Fuller writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon. His writing has appeared in Hobart, Volume 1 Brooklyn, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere. He can be found online @fullertj.