fish pancakes by Rachel Raabe

your dreams are spiraling and haunted and strange, and when you wake you are unsure if you are a glowing skull filled with snakes in some remote corner of the world after the end has come and gone or a living human being. you decide, for decency’s sake, to opt for the latter, and stumble to the bathroom. 

your phone is at two percent. hunger is a distant dream, but you make pancakes anyway because routine is grounding and you have things to do. your roommate had a boy over last night. he is nothing to you but a voice through the door and weighty footsteps on the floor and yet he still manages to fill up the whole of the space with himself, pressing up against your door, seeping through the gap between it and the floor into your room. your roommate is not nothing to you. your roommate is as cold and distant as the spaces between stars, a dead fish staring emptily up at you from the floor, an uninterested stranger who does not desire to know you nor to be known by you. 

 you can hear the ghost and the fish whispering now, words rendered as incomprehensible sibilant sighs. they are probably tangled up together in bed. they are probably – 

you wrinkle your nose. you start the coffee and flip the pancakes in the pan, perhaps a bit more forcefully than necessary. you think of your dream and feel very tired. 

you had the apartment all to yourself one summer, a year ago now (a year! a single second, an impossible lifetime, gone in the time it takes to traverse from one side of the street to the other and back again, and again, and again), and you close your eyes and try to pretend you’re back there, clattering about, delighting in your solitude. you try to pretend you can unbutton the tightness in your chest and let yourself unspool limply onto the floor. you try, desperately. 

(they are still whispering) 

outside the window it is bright. life breaks upon the glass like a wave against the rocks, smarting in your eyes. you have finished your pancakes. they are stacked in front of you, a placid, steaming mound, caked in butter and syrup, perfectly formed. you look at them, and imagine you’re somewhere, some-when else, years in the future, wearing the skin of another version of you, preparing to eat, to go about a day you cannot even conceive of. 

but the granite countertop is a transuniversal constant, a rude reminder. it needs to be wiped. you lift fork to mouth until you don’t feel like it anymore. and then you finish your coffee, and they aren’t whispering anymore, and the air hangs thick and heavy like a blanket over your mouth, so you retreat into your room and get to work.