In the Price Chopper, and I am about to grab a can of Niblets, quick Thursday dinner, when Dow, who is teaching Bio this semester, sneaks up behind me. There is all kinds of Phil Collins around us in the air, and Dow is his usual sweat on his upper lip and almost combover. It’s bad enough that I have to see Dow in the faculty lounge, but the supermarket ought to be off limits. And I don’t care that he has to eat. I’m pissed as hell that he failed my best student, Ron Kleig.
Niblets, huh? He says like he doesn’t know I’m not speaking to him. You just messed up a kid’s future, I told him yesterday in the cafeteria line. Squashed it, I even said. Now, Ron wouldn’t graduate. He’d lose the scholarship to UCLA, even after he wrote that great application essay, the one where he tells the story about the guy who broke into his family’s restaurant when Ron was helping out, just peeling potatoes. How the big chef knife was right there. I could’ve filet-ed the guy, Ron wrote, but all of a sudden the guy’s face became a big red, sweaty ham, all filled with fear and bad upbringing, and Ron made the choice in that moment to just punch him instead.
Dow starts talking about the Niblets, how it makes him think of his mother, how much he hated that she didn’t serve him fresh food, and he can still taste that awful metal in his mouth.
If I were talking to Dow, which I am not, I would tell him I agree. My mother was always saying that the time she saved by serving me Niblets was time she could use to be a good parent. Only that never happened. Mom was okay. Mom-ish in her own distracted way, but my father was always more important. My father got corn on the cob the nights he made it home in time for dinner. Which really wasn’t too often. When I asked her why I couldn’t also have the cob corn, how I wanted to eat it typewriter-style, like my best friend, Millie called it, my mother just sighed and said, you’ll understand when you’re older.
Which I am and I still don’t understand. I eat the Niblets now, even though I am free to eat anything I want, because I think it hurts the corn less. Or maybe it just feels a bit less violent, me not tearing the kernels off with my teeth. Oh yes, I believe vegetables can feel. I’m not saying they have much of a future, can’t go to UCLA, for example.
But I don’t want to agree with Dow about anything. So, I tell him how much I love the Niblets, that they were the highlight of my childhood. I look at Dow’s shirt. Little dots of frog blood on the collar, and it reminds me why Dow is failing Ron – because he wouldn’t dissect a frog.
Refused. This was the same reason Ron failed Bio in his sophomore year. And now as a senior, he was going to fail the makeup class. Ron had even come in during his lunch period last month, the day of the lab assignment. He told me that he looked at that tiny dead frog, splayed out like an open hand, how he took the tiny scapula all the way to that tiny neck but in the end, couldn’t touch it. Ron was all shaken, and there I was stacked up with papers. Ron told me how cutting things is not something he wants to become good at. I told him to write an essay about it.
~
Francine Witte is the author of eleven books of poetry and flash fiction. Her flash fiction collection RADIO WATER was published by Roadside Press in January 2024. Her poetry collection is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. She is flash fiction editor of FLASH BOULEVARD and South Florida Poetry Journal. Visit her website at francinewitte.com