Model Home

by Rivers Solomon

The flight attendant brings us our rectangular tray of scalding-hot food. It’s disgusting. It’s delicious. I devour it like a last meal, the way I do all airplane food.

Is she worried? Should I be worried? I tell her no, but she knows better. I wonder which of my lies she’ll remember, which she’ll cry about to her therapist, a decade or two from now.

Someone like me, more imagination than can fit into one body, you can die inside a fantasy of yourself.

She is five and chronicles all. We are old and weathered and have stopped keeping track of all the serpents that live in our garden.

I sound like I’m three years old. Sometimes, I am three years old. I can’t tolerate a single emotion. Every upset is a disaster.

Elijah is nervous and unable to fully appreciate the food. She understands that it is delicious, but in the same way that she understands that the area of a circle is pi times the radius squared: as a fact, not a feeling.