College Roommate

Dean keeps asking me hypotheticals. Takes swigs of vodka and raises his pool cue for another shot. “How ‘bout you were in a day-old toilet, and shit is all you have to eat. Would you eat it or would you rather die?” I take my turn and tell him if he asks me one more question I will pose my own, and he won't like his choice between death and death. But what he doesn't know is that I've been living his scenario all summer already when he fails to clean the dishes after he cooks hamburgers on his George Foreman grill and leaves the grease to solidify. This isn't even a real kitchen. The windows don't even open. The flies can’t get out. Our apartment is just the upstairs break room to his father’s direct-mail printing company. Poor bastards downstairs work their asses away while we live freely where they can no longer go. Always tastes of ink here. As a writer, I don't mind. But when Dean gets plastered every night and pisses on my couch, I find it hard to be cheerful. Dammit, Dean. Every Thursday we go horse betting and try our dimes on superfectas. One day we’ll hit it big and we won't have to live together any longer. One time I got all three, but the fourth horse fucked it up.

---

Daniel Lassell has been featured recently (or is forthcoming) in Reed Magazine, Atticus Review, Pembroke Magazine, Slipstream, Reunion: The Dallas Review, and Agave Magazine, for which he won the 2015 National Poetry Month Haiku Contest. His poems have also been anthologized, most recently in New Poetry from the Midwest 2014. He lives with his wife in Indianapolis, Indiana.