Michael Bose

Issue 16

Flash Fiction

The thing about ice cream is that it’s best when it’s hard. I’m talking near-frozen, struggling to get your spoon through the tub kind of hard. I want to bite down and feel some crunch in the fake Oreo bits, you hear me? I want to freeze my tongue off. Miss me with that soft, can’t-tell-one-flavor-from-another melted goop. Give me clarity in vanilla and caramel. Give me hard, delineated lines and crisp crunches. I want to crack my teeth on the truffles.

The first time I melted was at the foosball table. Ah, to be ten again. Me and my boys, reigning champions of the game room, sweaty and sugar high. There we were, with half a dozen half-melted ice creams in scattered bowls all but forgotten as I showed off my mediocre skills on the sticks. I boasted in the stupid way only a ten-year-old could, all to impress the little young miss with the golden hair and blue eyes that scooped me up and melted me, swirling out my emotions and twisting them into murky flavors that tasted greater than any cookies and cream.

“I was wondering if I could take you on a date,” I said, with a lot more stuttering and a lot more sweat under the dying summer sun than I anticipated in my head.

What I meant to say, ten and terrified, was, “I think I love you,” and “Lord, you’re beautiful,” and “You have the voice of an angel,” as she twirled a lock of shimmer-silk blonde around her artist’s fingers and favored me with a nervous, sad smile. I knew what her answer was before she even opened her mouth, my melted heart congealing into a mushy brown sludge, aching.

I keep thinking about her smile, sadder now, thirteen years later. She doesn’t sing anymore. Not after the doctors cobbled together the pieces of her mind like ripping weeds out of a garden, joys as shattered roots and apathy as the pesticide.

I hope she found her happiness again. If only it was so easy as to stand in line and place an order, adding serotonin to the hindbrain like sprinkles.

But we can’t. And a half-melted soul is easier to hide than it is to fix.

Instead, we mask ourselves in layers, heart-frozen men and candy-faced women, passing out pin-striped lies like truffles, saying, “I’m good,” when you’re really drowning. Saying, “The weather’s nice today,” when your marriage is falling apart and your job is on the line and the stupid freezer breaks down, wasting three months’ worth of food. Saying “Eh, I can’t complain,” when my brothers joke about jamming a shotgun down their throats as if it’s just an “Oopsies, spilled some ice cream on my shirt.”

Where is the joy we once had?

So many of us are melted ice cream bowls, forgotten, set out in the world to rot unseen. Innocence, like caramel, congeals into hard, hidden grief. Relationships crumble like Oreo bits, and all the lies we tell crystallize on our souls like hardened fudge, until one day we wake up, directionless. We stare into a mirror and a half-melted stranger stares back, saying, “Where did it all go wrong?”