he fridge is a fucking mess. You clean it. Your cousin comes by, a wicked tornado, and moves the cream cheese. He moves the chicken breast. He puts the honey mustard on the top shelf and horizontally orients the milk on the bottom, even though there’s plenty of space on the top (and that’s where the milk goes). He leaves the relish jar open. He turns it over and lets it fall to the bottom of the fridge. He laughs and says, “I’m in a bit of a pickle.” You clean it again.
Your cousin is a “photographer.” He sits in the living room, playing EVE Online. Strange field, photography. It’s been nine hours since he got up from his chair and you can see the vinyl of the seat crawling up his legs like ivy.
He siphons the internet through sausage fingers. You can’t even watch YouTube because he’s too busy getting blasted into the outer reaches of space by people with real jobs that they actually do.
Your half-fat aunt makes a visit to the fridge. She fucks it all up again. She puts the small sour cream container inside of the half-empty relish jar and closes the lid up. “My son’s a fucking faggot,” she mutters. “Such a lazy piece of shit.” She coddles him, but she thinks he’s to blame. They’re all lazy here. It is a house of lies. One time, you saw your aunt try to pick up a paper towel roll and then ask your cousin to drive her to the hospital because she fractured her elbow. She doesn’t have insurance so she just took your grandmother’s money again.
She gets paid to take care of your grandmother. She keeps her locked in a birdcage on the opposite end of the house. Sometimes you can hear your grandmother squawking for some food. Your aunt looks at your cousin and says, “Did you hear something?” He pilots his freight ship into a colonized planet to gather resources. “Sure didn’t.” They smile at each other. They high-five.
You won’t fight it. You open the fridge again. You clean it. You close it and open it a second later. There’s an ego waffle sat miserably under a bag of leaking vegetables. It is gathering a new strain of red mold. Possibly a biological weapon. You close it and open it again. Your cousin is inside it this time, a boneless wonder snaking through the shelves. He’s vomiting pudding.
You close it and open it again. Your cousin is out of the house. You ask your aunt where he went. “To do his job, of course. He’s such a good boy. You know that he makes more doing photography once a month than someone working 40-hour weeks at The Gap?
You’re sure it’s a lie. Your aunt goes to sleep. “It’s been a long day,” she says. It’s 1 PM. She woke up at noon. She got up to eat and mess up the fridge. She sleeps for eight hours. Night falls in the neighborhood. The section eight ward is covered in a pall of midnight ichor. Gunshots. Someone says, “You ate all my beans, nigga.” Gunshots.
Your aunt wakes up. She goes to check on your grandmother. You peer into the room. She opens a bag of birdseed and tosses it into the cage. Most of it falls to the bottom. Your grandmother reaches over with her mouth and climbs the cage, wrapping her toes around the straw-thin bars.
“Cookie.”
Your aunt says, “No.”
“Cookie.”
Your aunt sighs. She puts the bag of birdseed down, complaining about how much she’s already had to do today. She grabs a bag of dried papaya and banana slices. She puts her hand through the bars and holds a banana slice in the air. Your grandmother goes too far and bites down on her knuckle. “Singada hija de puta!” Your aunt slaps the cage, rattling it. Your grandmother reels back, taking a shit on the newspaper that hasn’t been replaced in four months. She hisses. “You want a cookie? Go get it yourself!”
She opens the cage. Your grandmother begins to flap her saggy arms. She flies around the room in circles. She is free. Your cousin returns from the photo shoot. Your aunt asks him where the money is.
“Well I had to buy beer. I can’t live without beer. I had to get my next three months of EVE. I had to put gas in the car. I had to buy a new scarf because it’s going to get cold in a few months. I had to buy a new pair of jeans. I had to buy new sunglasses — a photographer needs nice sunglasses. I threw my camera on the floor after the client told me they weren’t going to pay me so I had to buy a new one of those. I put it all on the credit card, by the way. They didn’t pay me.”
Your aunt falls asleep again. Your cousin stays up playing EVE until two in the morning. You check the fridge and it’s empty. You open it again and and it’s full of fishing lures. You close it again.