Salted Milk
Daniel Uncapher Maga once pointed out that we never use our phones in our dreams, and ever since then I’ve been dreaming about phones. *** I dreamed I was texting Maga but couldn’t input the right letters so I had to rely on the predictive text feature, which insisted on saying “I’m sorry, thanks,” over and over. *** After Maga died I wore her retainer every night to sleep without washing it. It didn’t fit and it hurt, even warped, my teeth, as my mouth slowly transformed into Maga’s mouth. Maga always suspected I was kind of sick, but I’m not sure what she’d say about this one. *** Maga once called me a futurefeeder. She said I feed off the future like everyone else in my cohort, which is what she called Americans. This is one reason why Maga never believed in the future. Queer people already disabled it, she said, but climate change finished it off. She said nothing about cystic fibrosis. But if you don’t believe in the future, I had to ask, then what am I feeding on? *** A life is an accumulation of habits, endearing on the whole but occasionally disturbing in isolation. Maga liked to eat cereal out of drinking glasses, which disturbed me immensely. She liked to try to pop the pimples on my back and shoulders when I wasn’t paying attention. And she put salt on everything, from her fruit to her milk, sometimes pre-salting a whole gallon. “Salt is a flavor enhancer,” she explained. “And it keeps the milk fresh, like days after the expiration date.” I continued to rely on expiration dates. *** I’m not one for bi-erasure, I mean I really hate the stuff, but the truth is I think Maga was gay. After the first week of our relationship we simply didn’t have sex, which she in turn attributed to her suspicion that I was gay, although in all other ways she was never one to endorse bi-erasure either. “Are you gay?” “I mean I’ve had sex with men before, if that’s what you mean. Are you?” “I’ve had sex with women, yes.” “But I’m in love with you.” Maga nodded. I knew she wouldn’t say anything. She never said “I love you” after being told “I love you,” because it felt too perfunctory. If it wasn’t a total surprise then she more or less refused to say it at all. *** Once I caught Maga sprinkling a taste of salt directly from the shaker onto her tongue. I reached out to stop her and accidentally knocked a dusting of salt down the back of her throat. I apologized, unable to explain myself and afraid. But Maga, laughing as she gagged, pried my own mouth open between her hands. “You try,” she said. *** Maga had two questions that she liked to ask the people that she met. One: can people change, or do they stay the same? Two, somewhat related: is history linear, or cyclical? The questions often came down to what you meant by so and so and other narrowing qualifiers, but they were clearly loaded from the start: Maga had no intention on finding answers. *** I didn’t just wear Maga’s retainer—I wore her therapy vest, too, sometimes for days at a time. The vibrations didn’t put me to sleep, just the opposite, which was, of course, the point; and when I was feeling really disgusted with the world I’d try out her nebulizer. *** The first time Maga and I went to the nudist beach we went for a walk down the rocks, where we encountered an old man furiously masturbating into the surf. We stopped and waited, expecting him to stop, but instead he looked at us and kept going. We stepped around him and kept going ourselves. Maga wiggled her waist and then hopped ahead of me, laughing. We had sex that night in the hostel and I discovered the taste of salt on her body. I thought it was the ocean, but it wasn’t—it was Maga herself and her beautiful skin. *** Maga kept the salt in the refrigerator, which I didn’t understand except to know that she kept almost everything in the refrigerator. For the most part I came around to this habit. The white fudge held together well on cold animal cookies, cold candy was almost always an improvement, and the peanut butter was no discernibly better or worse. There was so much in the refrigerator that certain things got lost to the noise, like a bag of brown lettuce I discovered only when it finally started to seep into the vacuum seal on the door, but rarely did Maga allow actual waste. The last thing I was thinking about buying for her was a second refrigerator. *** I dreamed that I found Maga on Tinder. I tried to swipe right but got stuck scrolling through her photos, of which she had a seemingly infinite amount, both real and imagined. When I finally managed to swipe right we matched immediately and she started sending me messages, sending my phone into a fit of vibrations that woke me up. I sat up in bed and checked my phone. No new notifications. *** Ayurvedic medicine forbids salting your milk because salt and milk are out of balance, but as far as I know Maga hadn’t followed the Ayurveda diet for years when I met her. She was instead concerned with waste, finishing off half-eaten plates and thrown-away food until, when there was no more waste to salvage, she would eat a fresh glass of cereal. It was a good arrangement; I loved to buy food but hardly ate, so there were always leftovers. Between the two of us we were very nearly zero-waste. These days my waste is non-zero. |
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About the Author: Daniel Uncapher is the Sparks Fellow at Notre Dame, where he received his MFA. His work has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Tin House Online, Penn Review, Baltimore Review, and many others.