Taste- Flash Fiction

What a great day. That’s what I was thinking when we pulled up to the drive-through window at Church’s Chicken and pulled the order of leg’s, thigh’s and biscuits away from the pimple faced teenager and into the car. I handed it over to my wife and watched her as she happily picked through the order for accuracy. I drove away and before I could even take the ramp back onto the interstate she had plucked a crispy leg from the bucket and began munching away with her perfect little mouth. James Taylor came onto the radio singing “Sweet Baby James,” and I just couldn’t help thinking again what a glorious, beautiful day.

We had left the hospital an hour before. Everything on the ultrasound was in order. All the fingers and toes were there, and we all started to giggle when the nurse pointed out the tell-tale shadow that let us know a son was on the way. Six more months and we would be parents; I would be a father for the first time and I sat there grinning in silence and staring at my wife’s petroleum covered belly wanting to wrap my arms around her with all the love and pride a man can muster. If the nurse would have allowed it I would have tried to make another one right then and there.

Now we were driving, she was eating the chicken she absolutely had to have and when she said she had to have it I didn’t blink an eye. One of many things I had learned the last four months was not to ever mess with pregnant women’s cravings. Pure foolishness if you even tried to so we stopped at the Church’s that sat three exits from ours and ordered absolutely everything she wanted. With a diet coke. The problem was, even though I wasn’t pregnant, the damn chicken smelled pretty good.

“C’mon baby, gimme a piece.” I asked her.

“You’re driving.” She said simply. “Wait till we get home.”

But I pouted playfully and she handed over a drumstick, which I promptly dropped on the floor under the wheel.

“That’s my man, graceful as a hippo on skates.” I heard her say as I dropped my head and groped around the floor for the greasy leg.

I remember being pushed. That’s what it felt like; it felt like a big hand pushed me in the chest. And then I woke up.

I woke up and that day was five years, four months and twenty-two days ago. So I’m sorry for talking like this happened only yesterday, this wonderful day when the world was bursting with love and hope and a son, but for me it was only yesterday. At least it was two months and thirteen days ago; which is the amount of time that has passed since I came out of the coma I’d been in since the accident. It was strange when I woke up. My arms and legs felt like wet pasta and I knew immediately something was wrong. The first thing I remember thinking was that I tasted chicken. Looking back now it seems silly since I hadn’t even gotten to taste the damn stuff but that’s what I remember. I tasted chicken and I was lying in a scratchy white bed with tubes in my nose and I felt like I wanted to take a shower. I laid there blinking at a florescent light above me and a few minutes later a army of white coated people poured in through the door and a few hours later I found out my wife and son were dead. They’d been dead over five years and I laid in that bed and cried for five hours straight. And then the process of living began.

The physical therapy was intense and seemed continuous. They started me on a liquid diet and then after a few weeks moved me up to solid food which didn’t matter a damn bit because all I could taste was chicken. They brought pudding, ice cream, roast beef and cheeseburgers and it all tasted like chicken to me. The second week Dr. Tomlinson came in for his Thursday visit and said that was something that would pass. The sensation of tasting only chicken I mean. It was a product of the coma and memory and grief; and it would pass.

It didn’t though but I stopped saying anything about it and they eventually, stopped asking; I went through the endless parade of therapy (physical and mental) that would bring me back to the world I now live in. Her parents came last night to the hospital, picked me up and we went to their house for dinner. I am glad they did and appreciate the effort but we barely enjoyed each other before the accident and the conversation was limited almost exclusively to the forks and knives and plates. I was the sad reminder of a wound that would never heal and her mother asked me as I opened the front door to leave why I had not mentioned her name one time. “Why do you avoid them.” Was what she asked and I said I wasn’t sure yet; that I didn’t know. But I did know and I knew to try and explain it to them would be ruthless. I had watched a movie while this world of pain and confusion swirled around me the third or fourth night I had come back and it had mentioned a African tradition of not mentioning the names of the dead. The tradition stated was that once you could say their names aloud again you would then move past the grief of their passing. When I heard it that same feeling of a giant hand pushing me backwards came back and I don’t remember the rest of the movie because I cried for several hours. They wouldn’t understand that. I don’t understand that but I know they have had half a decade to grieve and I have had several weeks. I know I am not ready for names yet; just memories of what should have been and I never mentioned one time that the lovely dinner her mother had prepared; that dinner of Roast Beef, mashed potatoes, gravy and fresh sweet corn that I could smell so clearly all tasted like chicken when I put it into my mouth.

So here I am now waiting on corn bread and soup or pork chops and applesauce; or whatever- knowing all the while what it will taste like. Soon I will leave the hospital as long as the therapy continues to progress and my mind, as they see it, wraps around the reality of things as they are. I look forward to it, to the new beginning of a life without starchy sheets and blood samples and… and emptiness. When it happens I will be glad and I will move on but the fact that I now remain on this rock, with a dead wife and child and that everything will always, always taste like chicken will be with me forever.

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Tags: dying, Fiction, flash fiction, writing

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