King and Queen

We run holding hands, smelling of french fries and chicken chunks, heading for the giant, inflatable, bouncy hamburger to fool around in under a cool, Michigan summer-night sky. Our shadow is a dragon in the passing cars’ headlights. The dinner rush remains on our uniforms, ketchup on my non-slip shoes, ketchup on my shirt, your hair smells like onion rings and my lips taste like salt.

Orange degreaser beneath our fingernails, hands rubbed raw, we’ll never be this dirty or this clean. We knew everything, rich at seventeen, cannonballing through the world, always you and me until it wasn’t. 

Before I engineered our destruction, before I abandoned you for fear and you left me for love, before I invented new ways to hurt you.

Pickle Lady, our weeknight regular, we knew, sold herself from the Motor Lodge: chicken sandwich, thirty pickles, and how could she tell if there were twenty-eight or thirty-one but I counted them, made that sandwich lumpy and vinegary. Glorious and wet in its wrapper. Me, judging her stringy hair and the way she walked through the drive-thru. Me, driving the car my parents gave me. She thanked me each time and disappeared behind the menu.

How many of our customers still eat there? Where is Pickle Lady, or the old lady who ordered french fries no salt and salted them at her table? 

Who visits her grave?

That one time the sky turned green and the tornado touched down in the field across the street. Hiding in the walk-in freezer. Didn’t someone try to place an order in the drive-thru as the end lurched in the farmer’s field?

I got to be your hero that day. The gas shut-off on the outside wall, behind the shrubbery. Over my shoulder, the sky inhaling, holding its breath. I cranked the handle and the broiler went dark on its way to cold and maybe that’s the last time you were excited by the pride you felt being with me.

I was the genius of the grill: extra onions or no onions, mustard and mayo, time-and-a-half every Thanksgiving. And you were the pretty eyes behind the speaker, a smile for every burger, smart with the money. A car full of band clothes and plans. 

Cardboard crowns on our heads.

Jason Kahler lives and works in the American Midwest. His work has appeared in Seneca Review, 14 Hills, Arsenic Lobster, and is forthcoming in Analog.

A Song for Jason