Cut Here By Meredith Drake

So I walked into my house and there was a box on the table from my girlfriend. It had drawings on it. Which is fine. She always draws on the boxes she sends, but so far, it’s been flowers or scribbles or whatever. This time it was dessert. A cookie the size of a head on the bottom of the box, a cake on one side, a pie on another, and then there was a bowl of ice cream that had a banana sticking out of it, and it wrapped around the corner of the box. Looked like a — you know. The brownies she drew on top were huge too. The brownies made sense, actually. I told her I wanted brownies, the good kind, the ones with chocolate chips and mint frosting. So that’s what I was expecting. Brownies. Plus I said I wanted three shirts, size medium, in sage green, dark blue but not navy, and light orange but not pink, not even if they call it salmon. With a collar, not a tee. She knows the shirts I like.

My housemates were in the kitchen passing around take-out. They said, hurry up; we can smell the brownies through the cardboard. There were arrows showing where to cut the tape, so that’s where I cut, and then I dug through the peanuts. There was her face. Well, a picture of her face. Her face put in a copy machine. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were puckered and smashed into a kiss. The paper was cut out around her head, and yellow yarn was glued on as hair. The whole thing was pinned into the neck of one of my old t-shirts. I pulled the shirt out by its paper head and looked at the peanuts underneath. That was it. Nothing else. Where are the brownies, someone said, and I grabbed the box and dumped out the peanuts. No brownies. Nothing. There’s something up the sleeves, someone else said, so I shook her head and paper arms covered with yellow yarn fell out, which is kind of interesting, actually, because last week I said how she’s the first girlfriend I’ve had with a lot of hair on her arms and that she should wax them. There was a smudge on her top lip, so I looked closer. OUT OF SUGAR, it said in tiny writing, but that’s ridiculous. She can just buy some.

© 2016 Meredith Drake

In a previous life, Meredith Drake worked as a newspaper journalist and as a writer for several universities. Now she works at her local library in a rural village in western New York and has the pleasure of daily conversations with actual readers.

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