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enjoy this writing from Kyle Hemmings in the free 6" x 9" 2017 PDF file chapbook: Scream (click on the front cover image or the title text to download the free PDF file)				You can also order this as a 2017 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the book cover or this title to get Scream as a book at any time!

Pringles

Kyle Hemmings

    After the funeral, I sat in his mother’s kitchen, watching her sprinkle cardamom and curry flakes into a large pot of soup. She turned, picked up a saltine, and munched. The crunching filled the room, then a long break of silence that made me uncomfortable. I could see in her eyes what she really wanted to ask: Was I gay and did anything ever happen between me and Malloy? She probably thought now was not the time to ask.
    In the corner sat a small black-and-white TV, the one that Malloy had always lied to me about—boasting that it was really color and much wider. It was really just a matter of adjusting one’s definition of grayscale, he always said. His mind, I imagined, full of complex calculations and saw-tooth wave patterns, full of saddle-shaped objects echoing across space.
    On the TV screen, some soap opera tycoon, who cheated on his last three wives because they always gave him inconsistent answers, was lying on a gurney. I asked Malloy’s mother what do they call those rubber wheels. What? she said. I repeated the question, pointing to the screen. Malloy always asked me questions about things that were seemingly insignificant. Like rubber wheels.
    “Caster wheels,” she said, and why do I ask?
    I shrugged and said, no reason. Actually, Malloy, who was in a wheelchair since the car accident five years ago, said the wheels were rubber to absorb static cling. You know what static cling can do to you? he once asked me. It can paralyze you. It’s the worse fear not being able to move when something unnamable and strange is making you inert, stuck. Mobility, he pointed out, was embedded onto our genetic blueprint. He was always up on all kinds of science and math trivia. Like the uses of castor oil, not to be confused with caster wheels. Or the smallest distance between two cars before they collide.
    In the last months, his face was pale and drawn, and I remember this uncanny look in his eyes, like he was carrying some nightmare with him for days. I think he knew he was going to die. I think he knew it and wouldn’t tell anyone. I think he was imagining the closest he could come to death before something “snapped.”
    I remember reading about this lethal comet that Nostradamus predicted but everyone else believed was harmless. That’s how Malloy explained it. He knew all the lies about harmless comets. He said it made him yearn for some distraction, something light and salty. Something that could make you giddy.
Across the kitchen table, I reached for a can of Pringles. I listened to my teeth chomping, the crunching and the futile attempt to chew softer. Those were Malloy’s favorite potato chips and sometimes we would sit across the table and chew Pringles to see who could chew the loudest and who would crack up laughing first.
    “Malloy,” I said. “Not now. Don’t chew like that now. It’s not funny anymore.”
    Malloy’s mother turned and said what? Who are you talking to? she said.
    Him, I was going to say. But I caught myself.
    The old Malloy was not here. Who or whatever was sitting across from me now was invisible and real and wasn’t who Malloy once was. I mean the limitations of body, of disability. The new Malloy was formless, colorless, could move in silence and infiltrate past all kinds of borders. My skin was itching.
    Malloy’s mother kept staring at me and asking if I was okay. She really wanted to know if I was cracking up but was just too polite to ask. But cracking up is something I don’t do anymore since Malloy’s death. Cracking up and pushing wheelchairs over hard two-dimensional floors. Malloy was a paraplegic with a knack for memorizing everything, for prizing amazing facts as if family members. For example, the paradox of a ghost’s fingerprints on a potato chip. In the last weeks, Malloy was trying to bridge whatever distance between us. More and more, his eyes were looking droopy, but he was smiling more often.
    If I ever make it to grad school, I will title my dissertation, The New Physics of Distance. I will steal Malloy’s insights into speed constants and how someday the universe will split many times over. I thought of all that boundless heat energy, abstract energy. He said some things that made no sense, that went over my head. Other things did make sense. Before he died, he told me that he loved me right down to the last snap. We both could have died smiling.

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