2027 Best Small Fictions Nominee: This is Not a Pipe by Lauren Kardos

This is Not a Pipe

by Lauren Kardos

from

Today it’s Little Debbie cakes for your feet with broken apart Kit-Kat bars for your toes. Banded together Twizzlers for your arms and legs, a belly round with Twinkies.

Usually my medium includes bits of gutter glass shards, loose fencing, dry roadkill pancakes, the tire left in the alley to rot. I make art like mother rodents build nests. Assemblages, cut up and Dada-esque. Frankenstein sculptures crowd my studio that once was your home office. Monuments poke through the second-floor ceiling and into the roof rafters.

York Peppermint Patties for your palms with candy cigarette fingers plugged into the round edges.

I once created by the bible of Magritte, so last year I burned the items that reminded me of you. This is not a pipe. Your journals and clothes and thrifted yarn and saved movie ticket stubs were not you. Your home office furniture, I axed to bits and slowly fed into the fire pit.

A chocolate rabbit heart and malted milk ball nipples nestled into your fondant icing chest.

Things I kept: your sweet-tooth, the top-right canine you’d point to in blame. The tooth that had me eating popcorn alone at our cinema dates and worrying over your blood sugar levels before doctor’s appointments. The one that fell out after your third round of treatment. I keep it in my nightstand drawer. I blame sugar for feeding your cells that ate and ate and ate, though every cavity-inducing treat you loved still fills our walk-in pantry. I never cancelled your monthly specialty sweets subscription, so pink boxes with candy cane stripes stack from floor to ceiling.

A monster Toblerone for your neck.

I let my digits stick together. Let syrup pool in my armpits.

I wish I had kept more. Photo albums and frames and vacation memory keyrings. Move on, forget, make art like you always wanted. You gave your blessing, those long nights when push-up ice pops were the only sweets you could consume. Your lips crusted purple, orange, red.

On this first anniversary of your death, I spend the most time on your face. Chewed Hubba-Bubba lips, jellybean nostrils, Pez pupils.

When I talk to people nowadays, I say, “I am a sculptor.” I pull art like salt-water taffy from the tendrils of my grief. But most days, I don’t talk to people. I wait, raccoon-like, behind the couch until the mailman leaves my groceries and provisions and miscellaneous packages. I can’t make newfound supplies from the things you left behind, but now I see the beauty in an overfull dumpster. Other’s trash becomes the treasure I wish I had saved when missing you consumed me.

Admiring you, my love, in all your sweetness sends my heart racing like the Halloween haul sampling before the sugar crash. When I’m perfecting a project, I don’t sleep, don’t eat. I fluff your cotton candy hair. My frock drips brown and caramel and pastel.

And do you lift your red vine arm and open your melting palm toward me? I swear your eyes are blinking, a gorgeous shade of blue raspberry that matches exactly what once was.