Cheetos
By Lisa Mitchell
Fingers threaded the trivet, palms clammed the surface, and I was double-dog sure the Ouija board lifted.
In the dim, dank room, I smelled them: Sherry, the Catholic, too-ginger neighbor girl. Her scent: onions and baby powder. And Jack, the sad-eyed, beautiful boy from down the way. His funk: feet and hard candy.
Sherry wanted to hear from her Meemaw. I wanted to hear from my crippled Aunt Willie. Jack was still, his head seemingly full of dirty thoughts. He cast his eyes my way, squinted. The creases around his eyes, flesh tributaries, made him look older than he was. Ancient, about 25.
Keep your eyes shut.
I see you peeking.
Am not.
A whoosh of wind, a stinging chill, an ice cube sledded down my spinal cord.
The board floated down, breaking the thick silence.
Then I saw it: Sherry’s fat pointer finger balancing the board. She’d slipped it under while our eyes were closed and channeling the decayed. Until then, I’d held on to my hope of the unseen.
“That was scary,” Sherry said. “I heard a voice.”
“I did, too,” Jack piped in. I could tell he was lying. His saucery peepers belied an unleashed wolfishness.
“What did it sound like?” I said.
“Mr. Chapel’s. All gravely like a dead person. Like his throat was full of bones.”
“What kind of bones?”
“Chicken bones.”
“How do you know what that sounds like?”
“Trust me, I know.”
He scooted closer. Blew me a kiss. We were everything.
“I gotta pee,” Sherry said. She uncrossed her legs and flashed her pink undies and as she left, flipped on the light.
Jack’s face was waxed with sweat, a glazed donut.
“You look hot,” I said.
He pawed his back pocket, then pulled out a white pad about an inch thick. Was it a Barbie mattress?
“What is that?”
“Got it from mom’s purse.”
He wiped his brow with this pillowy bed and displayed fingernails bitten to the quick, haloed orangey yellow.
“You been eating Cheetos?”
“It was my lunch.”
“Got any more?”
Later, when his fingers were prodding me, I wondered if my hungry body had gobbled up all the crumbs. Or if my pink insides had turned reddish orange like the Jell-O we ordered at Wyatt’s after church. Or maybe, my future womanhood was flaming peach, like the last sighs of a sunset.
At 14, I railed against my doubt, and continued to marvel at how God created the galaxies, and the next year, be shaken, digesting how humanity had actually invented a Big-Daddy-O-in-the Sky. In high school, I’d wilt after Jack would impale my child-heart—preggers, abortion—and cheat on me with an elfin cheerleader. He’d escape to Dartmouth and leave me behind in Royce City, where I’d work at the Dress Barn, while he, like Icarus, would spread his wings loud and luscious, become a rich doctor, snag a trophy wife. Big house. Perfect kids.
Me, I had fits and starts of happiness, like an old car choking to get on down the road. I made Regional Director for Mary Kay, until Mama got sick and died. Got engaged to an ophthalmologist, then broke it off. Won Yard-of-the-Month, my Daylilies aching and arcing towards heaven, so white and proud and true. Then got diagnosed with thyroid cancer, the best kind of cancer you can have, the doctor said.
Last night, I discovered Jack’s obituary in the newspaper, dead at 40. He suffered from a lengthy, undisclosed illness, his loving third wife at his side when he faded, took his last breath.
His face in the newspaper was sallow, puffy. His cheeks held a faint gasp of orange, near nectarine, and his Cheetos fingertips blipped before me. And yet, he was still bewilderingly handsome, his eyes, eternal.
My lids grew heavy and my heart fell into my lap. I turned to smoke, melted through the ceiling, and sailed off into the Milky Way. Through the glittering stardust, I could still see him, a blur of yellow and pink.
THE END
Author Bio: Lisa Johnson Mitchell's work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Fictive Dream, Emerge Literary Journal, and Cleaver, among others. One of her stories received First Place in the 2021 Button Eye Review Summer Contest and placed in the Top 10 of the 2020 Columbia Journal Short Fiction Contest. Other works have been honored by Glimmer Train, ScreenCraft, and PEN Women. She holds an MFA from Bennington College.