Yolk

by Mary H.K. Choi

I pocket the credit card and fake ID. It’s funny how no one ever notices that the names don’t match. And that the photo isn’t my face. Partly it’s that they don’t expect criminals to look like me, an Asian art student dressed in black, but it also confirms a horrible suspicion: that no one’s ever looking at me. Really looking.

her, depression is laziness that can

She said that there was more than one type of perfectionist. And that I qualified because the kind of perfectionist I was, was the kind that abandoned everything if I wasn’t good enough at it. And that’s why I couldn’t finish tasks.

lid. I

smart as

container

probably christened each one.” She smiles at my stupid joke. “Are you a farmer

Marc Jacobs’s 1993 grunge collection for Perry Ellis,

last dispatch was from a year ago.

and plants saucepans atop them.

to cracking up. Our mother smiles and mouths with the exaggeration of

quietly.

Manufactured urgency is their absolute favorite emotion. I get it. Control feels good no matter how small the triumph.

The macarons look like those cupcakes that are actually soap, but they’re pretty. Colorful and like jewels. I hold the glassine box to my nose and smell nothing. The pads of my fingers are impossibly sensitive, trembling, and I’m gripped by a singular purpose. I eat them in order. Begin too bright, tart, or even too dark and robust and you’ll deaden your taste buds for everything else. Green is pistachio, and pistachio is perfect. The sensation of my teeth piercing the delicately crispy outer layer, easing into the ganache, the viscid chewiness, makes me close my eyes—it’s too narcotic, too pleasurable, and still I can’t even tell if it tastes good. Orange. Brown. Lilac. I’m bludgeoned by sugar. I can’t discern perfume from texture.