Mass

Quentin Lobenstine, United States

a bag of grief is made in my stomach and preserved, just like that, for years. an etherized walk we take, a cheeseburger you forget to finish eating and leave in my car; me, watching myself letting the grease pool on the suede seatcover from the street outside. rain comes into my open mouth, and I gargle and spit 

imagining each cheeseburger i have ever taken, one by one, for hours, moving my gums in a dance of eating- new activities for after school, new things to do with friends, building for myself 

a barbecue world with a father and a thousand sparkling candles, a pattern of ketchup across my face, warpaint that provokes images of goodness, bliss: 

the transformed gym of my elementary school, laden with long plastic tables and tablecloths decorated by alters to unknown animals 

running rabidly through the empty halls, hands catching on doorframe after doorframe, until my teeth fall, one by one, out onto the waxed floor. 

and that same euphoric night finishing the meal as if sick to death 

imagining only your doughy face, two diamond pupils smooshed gently into it. it is terrible to see photographs of myself with long hair. 

it is my thirteenth birthday party cake. i am 

a girl again, chewing the cold chain of a locket that fits snugly with another. it is only the empty night I have now, and a greasy scrap of wax paper holding a congealed mass of cooking oil and american cheese and deflated bits of tomato. i keep it in the glove compartment. 

It seems quite tactile, provable, even beautiful, but it is mostly my imagining of the situation: in a few years, i will open the bag of grief and find nothing inside.

Quentin Lobenstine is 17 years old. He loves watching sad movies about mothers and daughters, little free libraries, and sifting through vast collections of old buttons. He lives in Shelburne, Vermont.