07/05/26

Experimental fiction by Adrian Cox

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The glass washer is droning a wet, gravelly sigh. I can’t pull my packet of dry roasted peanuts open by pinching each side of the bag, so I have to tear them open from the top, stretching slippery plastic until it comes apart like melted cheese. I’m squeezing two fingers together through the entrance at the back and opening them into the dark space inside, grabbing four or five peanuts and suctioning them between my lips like a fish. There’s no elegant way to eat peanuts, and I feel like a snuffling pig at a trough, peanut dust on my fingers and my jeans where I wipe them, and around my mouth. My stomach distends until it folds around the beer taps and leaks into the drip trays, and they feel the closeness I felt in my fat nana’s embrace.

The old woman with glasses and a pregnant-not-pregnant belly told me about her grandson, nearly two but talks like he’s nearly three because his mum Julie is forty-two and talks to him all day. I am reading a book about a mother who dies, my mother friend painted herself on her back with her umbilical cord dangling like rope, lowering her baby into the hard hospital sheets, or onto the floor. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. There was a dark red stain in the carpet next to my parents’ bed, proof that my sister isn’t adopted. I used to look for proof that I was adopted, studied photos of my mum, disappointed by her pregnant belly in shiny orange-and-red photos from 2003, when her hair was still the colour of autumn and she still let my dad touch her. He hated photos, he never let the camera see his teeth in case it didn’t give them back. I have to use my memory to see his teeth and his grey smoker’s gums, and maybe he should have thought about that, let the camera glimpse them just once for future reference. I am running out of memories of his teeth, he has swallowed them and left a hole where they lived in his skull.

My dad took me to the White Horse pub when I was nine and told me it was impossible for me to have my own opinions because I wasn’t a person yet. I raged in not-person, shouted in no-opinions, cried with all of the not-feelings I couldn’t handle because my little body had not yet grown into personhood. If I wasn’t a person, I would be an animal, so I bit him until he shook me off and called me a Brat. Not-people aren’t supposed to be angry; if they’re angry they are Brats. And I was born angry, howling out of my mum’s cunt, tearing through my umbilical cord with teeth and rolling my furious body around until the bedsheets turned cranberry juice red. When I was two, I threw myself onto the sticky supermarket floor and yowled with fury at being alive. I get my anger from him, so if I was a Brat, he was a Brat, too. Except he had grown out of being a Brat, so maybe he was just a Dickhead. I didn’t know Dickhead when I was nine, I just knew the boiling rage of not-personhood and the uses of teeth.

I was a fat kid because I had teeth to use and the will to use them. If I wasn’t offered something to bite, I would turn on myself. First my toes because I didn’t see the point of them, chewing the fleshy bits and spitting out toenails and bone fragments (save them for the dog). Then my too-big stomach, which would keep me going for a while. Maybe my nose after that, to escape the smell. My dad fed me crab sticks and pork pies instead because he knew that I was like him, with too many teeth and too much hunger.

Now I am loading and unloading an empty glass washer, squeezing each glass between my fingers until they crack.