Spinach
When we first started cohabitating, all our spinach would wilt. We both would buy separate bags on our separate Sunday supermarket runs. By month three, we made shopping a shared activity. We decided to eat more vegetables, to cut out processed foods, to watch 10-minute ab workouts every night before brushing our teeth. You never convinced me to floss, though. I couldn’t stand the red on the string, the red on my gums. For similar reasons, I couldn’t convince you to eat beets. After returning from the store, we’d rinse the produce. You’d peel the oval stickers off the cucumbers and apples and put them on our fingernails. We’d keep them on for the rest of the day, finding reasons to brandish our fake acrylics in the air, pointing unnecessarily. Inevitably we’d start to dance. Then drink. Then wake up side-by-side, the stickers crinkled into your bed sheets. One morning the landlady opened the door and found us spooning. She grumbled across the room with her miniature schnauzer, into the bathroom to fix the tub with the unreliable drain. Omofoba, you muttered when she left. I holed up in the shower, standing still under the scalding water. Steam swallowed the mirror, withholding my reflection. And then I avoided you for an entire week. The greens became broth in the refrigerator crisper, and I ordered overpriced quesadillas for lunch and dinner nearly daily. I got a gym membership and started taking the ab blaster class in the morning, leaving without brushing my teeth, hell-bent on hardening my core. When your sublease ended at the start of summer, we shook hands instead of hugging, and I returned to being a person who could withhold his secrets, a vase of a man, not the colander you almost bended me into.
Parth Shah is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Wyoming. Prior to graduate school, he produced podcasts for NPR. Links to his published fiction and journalism can be found at parth-shah.com.