Hoagie Lives for a Day
The curtains were shut and the blinds were closed and the Old Mayor had to walk through his dark house to get to the kitchen. He was hungry and wanted to make a sandwich, but his knees hurt and he’d forgotten how the outside looked. He hadn’t opened his blinds in years. He hadn’t gone outside. The people outside didn’t care for him too much after what he did. It was a scandal, he assumed. That is, he couldn’t remember what he did, but he’d been inside for at least fifty years, by his last count, out of shame. His wife had died, distraught, years ago. His children never called. He was lonely but he wasn’t sad. He’d forgotten about all that. There was no use in remembering. But he still needed to eat, after all. He paid a boy to fetch his groceries. He didn’t talk to the boy. He never saw the boy. The Old Mayor left some money and a list in an envelope in his garage and the boy took the money and list and returned an hour later with the Old Mayor’s groceries in paper bags. He could tell when the boy was there by the rumble of the garage door. There was no need to look outside. In fact, he couldn’t even be sure that the person who brought him his groceries was even a boy at all. It could have been anybody. It didn’t matter one bit.
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In the kitchen, the Old Mayor took out a hoagie roll, some bologna, and some provolone. He searched the refrigerator for some lettuce, but he only found a tomato. He brought out the mayonnaise and a knife. He laid out all of the ingredients. A cough gurgled up from his chest. The Old Mayor coughed. He’d had this cough for quite a while. It didn’t worry him much. He hadn’t died yet. He was bound to die eventually.
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He was hungry. He sliced the hoagie roll down the middle with his knife. He stuffed the hoagie roll with several slices of bologna and several slices of provolone. He sliced the tomato and added to the sandwich, then slathered a healthy portion of mayonnaise onto the top half of the hoagie roll. This entire process of constructing a sandwich greatly satisfied him. It filled him with wonder. Meat: once alive, now food. Tomato: once alive, now food. Cheese: a byproduct of a living creature, manipulated, cultivated, now food. Mayonnaise: human progress, now food. All this together was food, and once he ate it, his body would turn it into something else.
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Before he ate the hoagie: it was a creation.
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After he ate the hoagie: it would be shit.
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So: what did that make him?
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The Old Mayor regarded his hoagie.
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His hoagie regarded him.
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The Old Mayor lifted the hoagie to his mouth and the hoagie screamed. The Old Mayor put the Hoagie back down on the counter and poked it.
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“Don’t touch me!” the Hoagie screamed.
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“I made you!” the Old Mayor retorted. “Therefore, I will . . . eat you.” The thought that he was talking to his sandwich passed through his mind like anything else.
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“So that’s it?” the Hoagie asked. “You make me to eat me.”
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“The sandwich beckons the man to make it, the man eats the sandwich to live,” the Old Mayor said. He still possessed, he felt, the strength of will required of all great leaders. He punched his fists into his side and puffed out his flabby chest and realized that underneath his blue robe he wasn’t wearing any clothes and never had been.
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“Eat me then,” the Hoagie said, resigned. “Eat me if you must, but before you eat me, do me the favor of at least acknowledging I exist.”
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The Old Mayor contemplated this gesture by rubbing his sallow, cavity-punctured jaw. He squinted, peering into and invading the Hoagie’s soul, a trick-of-the-trade he’d learned while in office, and as far as he could tell, the Hoagie peered back.
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“Fine, then. You exist,” the Old Mayor proclaimed, feeling generous.
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“Ah!” the Hoagie said. “So if I exist, then you created me, is that so?”
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The Old Mayor beamed. “Truer than anything,” he said.
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“Then by that rationale, you created me just so you could eat me. In other words,” the Hoagie explained, with the breadth and confidence of a scholar, “you gave me life for the sole purpose of taking it away in mere moments.”
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“I suppose,” the Old Mayor said.
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“You’re a monster,” the Hoagie muttered.
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The Old Mayor gritted his teeth. The wind outside kicked against his house. He stopped to listen for the garage door rumbling, but he’d received groceries yesterday. All the things he’d done wrong with his life, he refused to feel regret for a sandwich. There was a dignity he’d felt he earned, a certain privilege, no matter how badly he’d botched every responsibility he’d ever had, at least, he assumed, just for being who he was, for putting up with it all. Didn’t he, despite everything, still deserve forgiveness?
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The Old Mayor reached for the Hoagie again and it screamed even louder. The Old Mayor stumbled back. “I can’t eat you if you’re screaming,” he said.
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“Is that how you want to be remembered,” the Hoagie asked, “as a man who would bring a creature into this world for the sole purpose of consuming it?”
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“They can remember me however they like,” the Old Mayor said. “They will, regardless. I have no control over that. The best thing I can do is ignore them.”
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“Like how you’re ignoring me?” the Hoagie asked sweetly.
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“Your purpose, as a sandwich, is to be eaten,” the Old Mayor said. “That’s all you will ever be. There is a dignity in accepting what you are. If you learn anything in the moments before I eat you, learn that. It’ll be more than most people.”
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“Then what’s your purpose?” the Hoagie asked.
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The Old Mayor paused. A ray of sunlight knifed across the kitchen tiles but just as quickly vanished. Had he actually seen light? Or was that, too, his imagination?
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“I’ve outlived my purpose,” the Old Mayor said. “I’ve been inside too long.”
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“You smell like it,” the Hoagie said.
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The Old Mayor laughed. There was something debonair about this sandwich. Was debonair the right word? Words, the Old Mayor thought spitefully. There were too many, and at the same time there were never enough. He’d talked for many hours in his lifetime. He’d given many speeches and roused people with his words. That much he could remember. Over time, however, he forgot why he roused them. Only the words, or the fact that he’d used words to rouse, made any sense, and after a while not even that.
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The Hoagie offered the Old Mayor a deal: it would let the Old Mayor eat it without screaming if the Old Mayor took it outside. The Old Mayor rambled around his house for some time, thinking and mumbling. He weighed the pros and cons. In the olden days he would have an adviser to tell him what to do. Lately, no decisions needed to be made. He was no longer equipped for such a delivery of consequence into the world. There was an element of elegance, besides, in staying indoors, in being a “hermit,” in the parlance of philistines. He was, after all, naked, in his robe, an artist, or some such figure. He was a mystery to many, he assumed, having never come out in years, fifty or so, according to his best-kept records, and there was value in the creation of mystery in people’s lives.
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There was, however, a catch: the charisma of revelation. To enter a moving landscape again would be good for his bones, he could hear his wife saying, his poor sweet wife who’d never wanted the limelight, even from the beginning but especially near the end, when whatever scandal thrust him onto his foolish stages. What he wanted to know, what he imagined his wife and his most trusted political advisers would have asked him, was whether or not he could trust the sandwich. Was this maybe some plot, some political sabotage? Or merely a seduction. Figureheads such as the Old Mayor were all too vulnerable there, he knew too well, or so he assumed he knew.
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It had been what the sandwich had said: “You owe me.” For bringing him into this world in the first place, was what the Old Mayor assumed the sandwich meant, but more than that, for bringing him in as a sandwich, cold cuts and cheese, a pitiable specimen, unable to defend himself but for that obnoxious, nauseating scream.
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In that, the Old Mayor mused, smiling, the sandwich was successful.
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The Old Mayor, after thoroughly deliberating, accepted the Hoagie’s offer, and went to his bedroom closet to dress. The Hoagie gratefully offered some fashion tips. It was full of energy, rocking back and forth on the bed, watching the Old Mayor try on a blue suit jacket, a red tie, some jean shorts and a pair of flipflops. The Old Mayor felt pretty keen in his sunglasses. He wore a cowboy hat to protect his scabby bald head.
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***
First the Old Mayor could see nothing but white. He inched his eyes open and whiteness gave way to houses: two rows of houses to the left, two to the right. In the middle was a burned down house. The grass around the burned down house was completely black. The rest of the lawns looked fine, and the Old Mayor was a good deal pleased by that, as if he’d had some doing in the creation of this neighborhood, which he had, in fact, as mayor, or at least he assumed he did, he liked to think he did.
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The Old Mayor was carrying Hoagie in the crook of his knobby elbow. “Well, what do you want to do?” the Old Mayor asked. “It’s your day, after all.”
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“I need to live a whole life,” the Hoagie said. “First, I need to feel wonderment.”
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“Wonderment?” the Old Mayor said. He knew just the place.
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The zoo, however, seemed closed when they got there. There was no one there. Before, when the Old Mayor took his children to the zoo, if he had children, he remembered how the sounds of the animals could be heard from a mile away. Now there were no animal sounds. Instead the plants were overgrown. Vines reached everywhere, despite not being natural to the area, as far as the Old Mayor knew.
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“Maybe if we venture deeper,” the Hoagie suggested.
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The Old Mayor’s favorite had always been the monkey island. The little creatures (the Old Mayor’s wife called them “little men,” back when she was still alive; the monkeys were her favorites, too) would swing around on ropes gracefully, wildly, smacking into the sides of rock walls, falling into the bright blue moat that surrounded their island. Despite being able to escape, as the Old Mayor amateurly calculated whenever he observed them, as their cages were not as high as their ropes could swing, the monkeys never tried anything. They were perfectly content with living a carefree life, well-fed and admired. And why wouldn’t they be?
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The monkeys, however, were gone from the monkey island. Only one monkey remained: a great black gorilla was crouched at the top of the rock hill, staring off dumbly into the distance, as if waiting for someone. It took him a while to notice that the Old Mayor and the Hoagie were watching him, scratching his armpit. Then it turned around slowly and pulled off its head, revealing a man underneath.
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“Oy!” the gorilla man called out. “Who let you in?”
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“There was no one at the gate,” the Old Mayor said, pointing somewhere.
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“No one’s been at that gate,” the gorilla man said. “Not for years.”
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“Where are all the animals?” the Hoagie asked. “I wanted to see the animals.”
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“You’re looking at them,” the gorilla man said, grinning. “Yeah, during the war—or was it after the war?—the city cut our funding. We had to get rid of all the animals. Sell them, for guns and bombs and what have you. So it must have been before? Anyway, I didn’t fight. I was a conscientious objector. I used to work at this zoo, in a custodial capacity, and when the war started, I found this gorilla suit and lived with the gorillas. I would live as a gorilla by day, man by night. When they sold the gorillas, I just hid in the kangaroo house for a while, in a little kangaroo pouch. They fed me, the kangaroos, they took care of me. They’re gentle beasts, they really are, despite what everyone says. All they want is to be left alone by most people. And don’t we all? But then they sold the kangaroos, too. They sold all the animals. After a while, I was a fugitive. I was subsisting on the popcorn kernels that kiddies dropped. I was starved half to death. So I ate the plants. I ate whatever I could, and lived as a gorilla. But I never had to fight in that goddamn war. At least I don’t have that on my conscience.”
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“The war?” The Old Mayor vaguely remembered some kind of war. There was a dispute of some sort. There was another mayor, from another town. There was some spitting involved. Maybe one had insulted the other’s tie. It was all lost to a fog in the past, but the bad feelings surged in the Old Mayor nonetheless.
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He cried out to the gorilla man, “You coward! You let your brothers die alone.”
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“Ha!” The gorilla man pouted. “It’s not as if I didn’t fight my own war instead. Scrounging around for old popcorn, my brothers, as you say, dying alone. My mother, my poor mother. And my father. My poor father!” The gorilla man began to weep.
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“This is fantastic!” the Hoagie exclaimed.
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The gorilla man abruptly quit weeping. “Fantastic?” he growled.
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“I came here to experienced wonderment, and now I’m experiencing disillusionment.” The Hoagie was quite pleased. “A fuller life I never imagined.”
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The gorilla man reared up on his hind legs and pounded on his chest with his fists. “If I ever met that man again, the man who sent my brothers to die alone in battle, and me to become a lowly scavenger, I’d tear his head off and eat it!”
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“Well?” the Hoagie said to the Old Mayor. But the Old Mayor couldn’t stomach it. He backed off slowly, his slippers scraping the cement, and ran from the zoo. From beyond the gates they could still hear the gorilla man roaring.
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***
The next thing the Hoagie wanted to experience was love. The Old Mayor brought it to a brothel. From the outside, the brothel looked well maintained. Even the inside, at first, seemed professional, a long hallway with red carpeting and portraits of beautiful, lascivious women lining the walls, pouting seductively from their frames. But as the Old Mayor and the Hoagie got further into the belly of the house, the paint began to peel and rusty pipes leaked small rivulets into the cement floor, which was cracking, of course. The Old Mayor’s belly rumbled as they walked. He would have found this voyage down the hallway suspenseful and stimulating back when he was younger. Instead, he was just hungry.
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“Do you believe in karma?” the Hoagie said, out of nowhere.
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“God forbid,” the Old Mayor said.
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“Too bad,” the Hoagie said. “If you did, you’d have a reserve of good karma for all that you’re doing today.”
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“I just want to eat,” the Old Mayor said. He fell into a coughing fit and stopped walking. When he was finished, he wiped his mouth and continued on.
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After what seemed like miles, and very well could have been, the hallway opened up into a cavernous, industrial space. Light fixtures hung nakedly from steel ceiling beams. The cement ground was splotched here and there with murky, reflective puddles. Two women, a redhead and a brunette, both older, were standing against the furthest wall, smoking. They were wearing scruffy corsets and leather jackets. They didn’t move.
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“What do you want?” the redhead yelled from across the large, empty room. The brunette stared and continued, slowly, to smoke.
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The Old Mayor felt a strange déjà vu. He’d been to this brothel before, of course. That was how he found it so easily from the zoo. After being all worked up by the gorilla man, he would come to this brothel to . . . relax? Some things were fuzzier yet. His feet hurt in his flipflops and he was sweating under the weight of his suit jacket.
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The Old Mayor held up the sandwich with both hands. “I’m trying to show my friend some love,” he said. “I’m paying. We have a deal.” His belly gurgled.
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The two women regarded the Hoagie. “How old are you?” the redhead asked.
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“I was just born today,” the Hoagie explained happily.
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“That’s a little young,” the redhead said.
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“Happy birthday,” the brunette muttered.
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“Yes,” the redhead said, “happy birthday.”
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“Thanks,” the Hoagie said.
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“But still,” the redhead sighed. She elbowed the brunette in her puffy side. “We could use the money. It’s been quite some time since we had any money.”
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“How much?” the brunette called out.
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“Enough,” the Old Mayor said.
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“Enough is good,” the redhead said. “Enough is better than usual.”
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“Enough is enough,” the brunette said.
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“Exactly,” the Old Mayor said.
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“Enough is never enough,” the redhead said. “But it will do for now.”
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They stood and made no move to take the Old Mayor’s money or seduce the sandwich. The Old Mayor shuffled his swollen feet. He was perspiring abundantly.
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“Where are the girls I get to choose from?” the Hoagie said.
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“Unfortunately we’re them,” the redhead said.
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“Nothing to do with fortune,” the brunette said. She lit another cigarette with the burning tip of the other and dropped her finished cigarette to the cement floor, grounding it out with the naked pad of her foot. The Old Mayor flinched at the familiarity of this motion. The great love of his life—not his wife, but another—would snuff out her cigarettes this very same way. He remembered how she smelled, mostly, of tar, gasoline, and just the faintest hint of coconut, in her hair.
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“It was sabotage,” the brunette said, “a scandal. We were rooted out, chased away. Like animals.” The Old Mayor could swear she was staring straight at him, and he had to look away, ashamed. “We were used,” the brunette continued, “promised things, forgotten. For that cow. He had a ‘change of conscience.’ It happens, I suppose. But the press, plus his political enemies, all sorts, coming out, taking a stand, and our house, or what’s left of it, scandalized. Most girls couldn’t handle the pressure. Some killed themselves. Others? Were there others?”
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The Old Mayor held his hand over his mouth. The redhead licked her lips and pointed at the Hoagie. “But you don’t mind, do you, honey?” she said.
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“I just want to be fondled,” the Hoagie said innocently.
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“Don’t we all,” the redhead sighed, dragging on her cigarette.
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The brunette was crying silently. “The last time I saw him he said, ‘We’ll see each other again.’ I said, ‘Where?’ And he said, ‘The dark place.’ But . . . I . . . we . . . I never got there. We never got there.” The Old Mayor choked back a cough.
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“Oh,” the Hoagie said, “that’s terrible. Did you say the dark place?”
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“Stop depressing the sandwich,” the redhead said. “He’s our . . . client! Oh, that word is music to my ears.” She slapped the brunette on the back of her head. The brunette dropped her cigarette and rubbed the tender, greasy spot in her hair.
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“What was that?” the brunette said.
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“You selfish hog.” The redhead spat a cold loogie. It landed heavily onto the cement. “Some of us don’t have love. We have work.”
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The brunette reached in and removed a switchblade from the cleavage of her corset. “Is it time we finally did this?” she said to the redhead.
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The redhead readied her own switchblade. “I suppose it’s inevitable,” she said. The Old Mayor and the Hoagie watched as the two women circled each other.
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“This isn’t necessary!” the Old Mayor called out finally. The brunette paused, turned her head, her crinkly brown hair whipping to one side of her face, and the Old Mayor’s chest exploded with nostalgia. The brunette smiled one last time before the redhead ran the switchblade through her neck. The stabbed woman fell to the ground, clutching at her wound, squirming, dying. The Old Mayor wanted to console her, but just as soon as his nostalgia appeared, it was gone, and he felt nothing but shame again.
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“Well,” the redhead said, panting, to the Hoagie, “that’s that. Are we ready?”
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The Old Mayor reluctantly handed the sandwich off and the redhead brought it into some dark corner of the room. She hunched over him, her back arched inwards, though the Old Mayor couldn’t see specifically what they were doing in the shadows.
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When they were finished, the redhead brought the Hoagie back to the Old Mayor. The Hoagie was hyperventilating. The redhead lit a cigarette and held her hand out. The Old Mayor pressed a few creased bills into her palm and left hurriedly with his sandwich.
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***
The sun was setting on the Old Mayor and the Hoagie as they shuffled down the sidewalk. The Old Mayor, by now, was starving, but beyond that, he felt an unbearable gravity settling into his shoulders. Pretty soon, he realized, he would stop walking at all. He would never be outside again. He squinted at the sunset. He thought he would see some beauty. But all he could see was sunspots. He looked away.
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The last thing the Hoagie wanted to experience was grief. The cemetery, however, was quite a distance away. There was nothing to see there, besides, just stones and names that nobody remembered and nobody ever really knew to begin with.
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“Grief is a necessary part of life,” the Hoagie said. It whistled. “And, recalling our deal, by the look of the sun I don’t have much life left.”
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So the Old Mayor bent his head, squared his shoulders and hustled on and finally they reached the cemetery. They passed through rows upon rows of gravestones. The Old Mayor recognized this place: the tree, the gnarled oak, at the bend of the dirt road, red ribbons tied around its branches; the dirt road itself, chalky and studded with pebbles; a bronze statue in the courtyard of a soldier, a pot on his head, awkwardly grappling with his rifle. The eyes of the statue seemed to be following them as they walked by. The Old Mayor, spooked by the statue’s animation, saluted it.
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“I would salute it if I could, even without context,” the Hoagie said.
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The Old Mayor and the Hoagie kept on and came upon a gravestone violated with graffiti. The Old Mayor kneeled. The gravestone was as wide as a bed. There was room enough for two names. One was a woman’s. Her birth and death dates were chiseled in. The other name was a man’s. He, apparently, hadn’t died yet. The neon-colored graffiti spoke about disgrace, war, whoring, absolution, the end, THE END, in bold calligraphy.
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The Old Mayor fell back. His wife, yes, he had a wife, back in the olden days. She threw the best parties. She volunteered quite a bit. She could drink anyone under the table, and once when the mayor of a neighboring town tried to cheat him in cards, the Old Mayor’s wife cut off the other mayor’s finger. Or, who was that? Was that his wife, his sweet wife? She called for the death of the Old Mayor’s enemies, more than he did, it sometimes seemed. He was the monster, not her. He was the one who perpetuated the scandal, and she died a saint. Was that how it went? The Old Mayor couldn’t remember anymore. He pulled at the grass above her grave. This was her! It was. He bunched the grass in his hands as he would her hair and shoved some of the grass, worms and all, into his mouth, before coughing it all up and continuing to eat it.
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The Hoagie, which had been rolling around in the dirt, coming undone, screamed. The Old Mayor stopped eating the grass and stared at the sandwich.
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“I don’t remember anything,” the Old Mayor said. “Everything has happened, but I don’t remember what anything was. It’s as if it might as well have never happened.”
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“But everything did happen,” the Hoagie said, very zen.
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“But, but . . .” The Old Mayor looked up at the sky. Pretty soon it would be too dark to find their way home, so he gathered the sandwich’s parts and headed back.
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***
Groceries were waiting for the Old Mayor in the garage when they got home. Darkness had fallen over everything. The Old Mayor went into his den and turned on a lamp. He took off his hat and threw it across the room. He removed his jacket and loosened his tie and sat down in his La-Z-Boy and set the sandwich on the table next to him. He coughed wetly several times and then stopped. He kicked off his flipflops and rocked in his chair.
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“Thank you for showing me around,” the Hoagie said.
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“It was awful,” the Old Mayor said. “My feet are killing me.”
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“I expected as much,” the Hoagie said. It sighed dramatically. “Well, I guess you can eat me now if you want. That was the deal, after all. I’ve lived my life. Now it’s time for me to serve out my purpose.”
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“I’m too tired to eat,” the Old Mayor said. “Let me just sit here for a moment.”
The Old Mayor rocked in the dark, humming to himself. The Hoagie contemplated everything it had seen that day. There were conclusions that could be drawn, the Hoagie was sure, but he couldn’t parcel out what they were, other than things had happened, and now that was how they were. A longer life, the Hoagie realized, studying the Old Mayor as the Old Mayor closed his old eyes and rocked in his chair, would be too lonely, too much. It was glad in the end that its purpose was to be enjoyed, to be savored, to nourish another, after all. There could be worse destinies, less savory ways to be remembered, than being a good meal for someone.
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“You can eat me now,” the Hoagie said triumphantly.
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The Old Mayor said nothing. His eyes were closed and he’d stopped rocking.
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The Hoagie screamed.
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But the Old Mayor didn’t move.
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The Hoagie screamed again.
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The Old Mayor had stopped rocking long ago. The lamplight flickered. Finally, years later, the bulb burned out. The garage door ceased its rumbling.
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“Please eat me,” the Hoagie whimpered in the dark.
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No one heard it.
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END