Saturday, September 24, 2016

SPAM SANDWICH

Stormi decided she should change her name to something more respectable, something much less white trash. Lisa. Anne. Joyce. Beth. The third or fourth creative writing professor suggested in a carefully worded e-mail that perhaps the workshop experience was not a good fit for Stormi. Stormi didn't cry or get drunk on Jack Daniels. She didn't kill herself. She showed up to the Wednesday night workshop in a SPAM t-shirt and sat back with a smirk on her face as her peers tore her story a new asshole.

"Um...I don't mean to insult you? But, like, this reads like something I might have written in a unicorn diary when I was, like, twelve years old," Hillary said.
"I have to agree with Hillary. I'm sorry. But your story is, like, totally...what's the word I'm looking for...immature?" Donald said.
"Puerile," Josh said.
"Yes! Exactly. Puerile," Donald said.

Fucking Ploughshares. Fucking Glimmer Train. Fucking Smug Society of Dead Hot Shit Writers. Stormi thought of the story about the man who swam through a series of swimming pools on his way home. What in the actual fuck of all fuck? Oh the symbolism was rich and the metaphors were quite puissant indeed. Alcoholism. Class. Alienation. Despair. Futility. But how many motherfuckers could identify with that New England upper class bullshit? Then there was Raymond Carver. Oh that motherfucker knew what he was doing, no doubt. But again. Everything smacks of Daddy. Daddy will not be dethroned. Daddy daddy daddy...throw poor little cracker bitch from the North Texas sticks a bone.

So Stormi wrote about a sandwich she remembered from Seymour, Texas. Her paternal grandmother fried the SPAM in a skillet to make it classy. Put it on white bread with mustard. BAM. Add some tater chips and a Coca-Cola. You got yourself a lunch.

And Stormi wrote about the Mexican (Hispanic? Latina? Chicana? In Stormi's memory she was a Mexican) mother who chased her out of her yard in Jacksboro, Texas with a broom and yelled at her in Spanish. She didn't want a white kid playing with her brown children.

And Stormi wrote about watching her favorite cartoon on the little television in the little den with blue and green shag carpet in Goree, Texas on Saturday mornings and then being babysat by the junior high cheerleading squad when her parents went to Wichita Falls for a date that one night and one of the cheerleaders whispering in her ear,"When Anna comes back into the room say Hey Hey Hey! It's FAT Anna!"

But then Stormi decided it hurt too much to go back in the mud of her past and dig for worms she would rather forget so she wrote about werewolves and chupacabra and shadow people who hissed bad news. The monsters were real but the names she assigned, those were all fake.

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