[ToC]

 

THE COTTAGE CHEESE DIET

Amelia Gray

There's no reason. There's no reason why you couldn't. There's no reason it's not possible you couldn't possibly finish your mild cottage cheese breakfast, buy a ticket, take that train to the edge of the world, squeeze your eyes shut, dig the wheels into moist world-edge earth and make a dramatic plunge off the side, your friends and family waving good-bye as at the end of a parade when all that's left is sandwich wrappers and the rest of a long day, sun streaming through all the windows and still a cold room no matter how much light hits every corner, even if you take the curtains and flip them over the curtain rods so there's nothing impeding the procession of light, that kind of lazy afternoon where someone in the house mutters a promise to make banana bread but you know the bananas will spoil and cultivate bacteria, becoming dangerous like the kitchen counter you washed in your younger years first with warm water and later on with the stronger stuff, ammonia making you dizzy behind your allergen-free mask, a boiling water rinse and a layer of bleach, just a bit of the stuff mixing together into what you hear is dangerous but secretly know is a chemical so powerful that certain entities don't want you to hear about it, and by "certain entities" you mean the government, these powers in power have other plans for you but you're one step ahead, you and your sleeves with the tricks in them and your special diet, the cottage cheese diet, the diet with cottage cheese, and as you eat the cottage cheese you hold very gently on your tongue the cottages and the people inside the cottages and the people are screaming.

 

 

 

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At the time I wrote this, if you had asked what I would bring to a desert island, I would have said: a generator, a mini-fridge, twelve gallons of cottage cheese, and the short stories of Gary Lutz. Now, I don't know what I would say.