Real Food

   
    He plays dice alone for three hours and eleven minutes through the afternoon. Later, they eat Lemon Soup. "Lemon soup isn't a real food" He mumbles this, stirring the watery stuff in the bowl, little flecks of green and black. They don't eat bread with it, because bread is a conspiracy.  

     At that time he would forget, often. Then, in remembering, everything would be fresh skinned and raw. A new, quivering growth fixed in some stupid cycle of bewilderment that stuck tangible and hard there in the throat. He spent plenty of nights trying to dislodge it, pushed one, then two, then three - but probably not four, fingers into his throat. If he rested his cheek on the wooden seat and trailed a hand in the water then it was a fragment of a broken ship in some becalmed and filthy sea. If he got noticed, then at least the rhythm changed, or something. He tried to make these exaggerated retching noises and fake coughed hard enough to bleed a little. Wait for the deck to creak and she'd be in the doorway, sort of awake, scratching. Then he'd stand up and follow her downstairs into the kitchen where she'd boil milk or roll a joint depending on how old she thought he might be that night.