SYLVANNA VITALI

Raw Things

      In childhood I have to fry the American flag. I know how each of its stitches react to the vat, the new tone of the whites in their grime. I bread the pledge of allegiance; fourth of July fireworks and Grand Old Flag are all thrown into my tub. These things are to serve up to the block, so I pull the basket out in front of my schoolmates and the jungle themed park on the corner. Consistently, I make the oil too hot. For all the frying of them I see going on around me, I see no need to take care. Drop in and shake out- the outsides look crisped enough and the inside still uncooked. Heave the metal mesh back and forth thinking, already am I a second hand fryer?
      Dad talks about barbecues. Says barbecues are an honor, a sign from the Neighbor's Association. I flip through the Bible, but find nothing. Most of the men on the lawn wear their hair on a side part ripped open with gel, stuck on its gaping edge. I want so badly to leave their father-son picnic talk—slimey all the way through— to waste. Dad brings me to the grill, so inferior to my own appliance that boils out a chuckle at the burned grates. What he teaches me about chicken is the alternative. He puts my hands on the full bubbles of their legs, has me coat them lightly with oil. Mostly I watch the pale line that slices through his temple deepen, drool at me. Mostly, I think it is strange proportion of oil, but still a waste. The tongs crust over and became impossible to wash, the char flaking off onto the meat.

      In fifth grade social studies, the teacher asks What were we before we were American? In my parents I look for something besides their skin and eyes in color scheme like a stock image of a beach with bleached sand. Because frying them would be useless to me, I often let the palettes of their face press back from their own natural suction, meld into overripe blue green.
      The girl behind me, Sandra, has been sleeping. In the back? Anything to say about what we were before we were American?
      I crane my neck but kept my head down, watch with the rest of us as Sandra lifts her chin, rests it on her arms that she crossed over the desk.
      She shakes her head. America's all of it. It's not about before.
      I am the only one left turned around. Sandra looks at me and says You get that? My tight red braids blush. I want to tuck them behind my ears as I shake my head no.
      Wouldn't you know more about where you were born? The teacher interrupts.
      Nebráska? Sandra sharpens the dormant lilt, rests it in her front teeth. She puts her head down again in the teacher's stuttering. Before class is out, she passes me a note.

      Sandra takes me on the bus with her that Friday. We ride into the city her family moved back to because they tried my neighborhood but couldn't take it. We ended up driving forever just to see our family and get decent food. Sandra knows Sixth. It's where she's always lived, apartment by apartment down the same potholed street. As easily as my dad grills his chicken, the people fry all these faraway things: songs, an argument, five pairs of stilettos. She stops to get us a bag of chicharrones. A little dip in the bodega windows is the entrance to Sandra's building. She punches in a code and jiggles the button a little, and the rusted black gates come undone for me. My eyes are bigger than her staircase. We had a yard and everything back there but we don't need space for much. I stand looking out of Sandra's living room window and I wonder where these people keep the masses of street fry ready on the street. Sandra's fingers are in the greasy bag.

      Sandra teaches me what is worth my oil better than a barbecuer. She hands me whole cartilage-riddled books to read and then says forget everything you just read. She teaches me that saying this is overdone. She says cooking hastily doesn't teach me anything. She wants me to wait before throwing something in, to watch things sit in their own pulpiness and study. To cook through at a low, thorough temperature. When she introduces me to plantains and marímbulas she has to tie my hands together so I don't reach out for my hot plate. I offer to do her homework, to buy her lunch. I start to know Sandra's name as so many hisses, pops, and releases. Adjusting my temperatures, I ask her to tell me things, to narrate constantly. One day she makes me put my appliances away and says It's not that I know anything. I'm just around. I don't even consider this until I'm a block from home and realize everything in the park is the same color.

      Without Sandra that night, there is a computer.
      Click. Remember the sticking goo, let my joints
      press in and be filled.
      Download Dictionary?
      Click.
      Submerge. Heat up until there are scales.

      The next day I tell Sandra about lemurs and a boat from so long ago we only have paintings. Though she smiles, she questions my sources. We sit down to our purple lunch trays and I explain the jokes in chewed up print on our popsicle sticks. Because clowns taste funny. Like "haha". Get it? Sandra throws her stick in the trash. I follow. I learn how to ration oil better, saying the machine needs rest when I am asked to serve up a monument. I let granite be soft and gum structured, then go slowly to the flies. I spend morning recitations at school in the bathroom, I vandalize town meetings with my humming.

      By the fall before Sandra and I move West for college, I have developed a beautiful crisp over everything she knows. My Vicente Hernandez flakes and crumbles, collapsing on its own goldenness. Benny Moré lyrics break apart, light and warm under my hard palate. In the same few batches are the process of darkroom development, the Beehive hairdo, the legal use of abandoned warehouses in our county, Bobby Capo's greatest hits. The frying is done carefully and deep. The oil static gives Sandra's grandma noise enough to talk about a man who breaded mop rags as steaks in the other country. Sandra eats turkey in November with my block out in the yard.
      When we get West I swallow frantically like I did in the early days of middle school before I learned to drop in and drain out quietly. There are new trees. Their leaves do not serve as placeholders. I think once they are taken by my machine their green will stick beautifully. Sandra mostly stays in our apartment or on this one street in downtown. She says this out of everything smells the most tolerable. She likes to walk into the open cafeteria kitchen with bead strings in place of a door. I walk ambitiously, sometimes wandering so many miles I have to call a cab back home. I study hard and neglect school. My hands constantly have burned spots from the oil. I keep ready. Sandra says the heat out here makes her lonely. For her sake, I try to grasp this feeling of being reminded, but come up short. The batter over it separates and slides off in my tub. The heat makes me look elsewhere, doesn't slow me down. I think I could build a tolerance.

      By the end of this I do not like Yeti. Yeti is the plagued eruption in an otherwise silent end of days.
      I meet him in a bookstore exclusively for encyclopedias. He is on my stool by the 70s section when I walk in. I could cook Yeti's tongue and dry it off on my grandmother's apron. I would not eat this because Sandra's grandmother says tongue is not strictly traditional though I could fool myself and say it is a breaded mop rag.
      I come here at five, I announce to the top of his head.
      He does not look up from his "Lizards and the Demons They Are Spawned From."
      Five? But it's four twenty five.
      I cannot believe this man's semantics. So I came early. So what?
      This is my stool. He continues, I come here Wednesdays between two and four.
      Then you're late. I say.
      He looks up but keeps his index finger on a line, slides one cheek off the chair.

            Yeti was a blonde, thin thing. Yeti looked exactly like a bull: thin, tall, shaky, pointing his horns left to right, north to south.
      Sandra joked that seeing us walk together made her nervous. Something about his clavicle, she would say. Can't trust it. All of him was loud even through the glasses.
      Whether or not I had started to believe in staying as a pleasure is irrelevant. So are the blue pen marks I drew on my ring finger. Mostly, I tried to crisp up his family stories or stray comments in search of a pattern when there were no scraps to mend anything from. Yeti made sure his life was cold and soggy to my lubricated fingers. It did not take to my vat well.
      The Tuesday before I found them, I passed a billboard. It was of a bull charging. The caption read I am cheating on you! I thought, That looks exactly like Yeti. They were in the back corner, nestled between the "Hedgehogs In Pop Culture" and "Post-Divorce Sightseeing" shelves. No, there was no sign. Not of him and not of Sandra. Yes, it was in the same bookstore but more than this, what left my snot covered fingers reaching for the hot plate was that her bare nipple was resting on his clavicle.
      Things happen. To reach a conclusion, I fry everything again and again until their mass becomes too much for even my power center of an appliance. There is no industrial size for Sandra's late nights, her bitten nails. Everything pushes and becomes greasy. I cannot move even one thing out of place. I move out. Sandra cries. My collection of her doughs spill out all over the street, despite their grease I leave them out for the sun fevered compost.
      I move in with Yeti. He brings me flowers. I become uncontrollably angry often. He cowers and does his best to make you are loved as active voice as possible. I wish I could throw the whole corner into my vat, fry, draw the rawness from it, and be done with it. When I try, it is enormous, my oil wades up to the first row of shelving. The furniture would resist me. The incident is still grey pink and reasonless. I shove. The cold fibers line the mahogany and floor. A place is beyond me.

      Research takes me to the corner often. It still smells like Yeti, and when I pass through it I run to the beach. I call my friend. She knows how the stench of Yeti and corner clings to my back and I cannot sprint from its lingering behind me. She meets me by the lifeguard tower.
      Does he tell you he's sorry? she asks.
      Oh, every day. I crunch a fistful of sand into my fingers while spitting up shell fragments. My friend pauses to look at me. "Sorry" is not how he should wake you up.
      The beach is a fossil the beach
      doesn't need me to keep it I drop
      in and out. At some point it's hitting my sandal
      to shake it clean.

      Sandra's grandmother once said that somewhere else her husband stayed home because the outside of somewhere else was damp and smelled like a burst vein. Somewhere else, he would have done this privately. Yeti can have fry truck fries at any hour. It is maybe the most comfortable thing.
      I do not know where I end up. It's not west. My business card reads I have other fish to fry. There is an epidemic of rotting everywhere I turn. I keep people fresh and appealingly sticky. Try to keep them from stumbling into my vat.

Sylvanna Vitali appreciates you putting aside the fact that she is from Florida and reading this. Her writing appears absolutely nowhere else.