"Because I'll probably never have it. Everyone has their fantasies, right?" I said. I hoped I didn’t sound like I was betting against her or pitying myself. But standing in the center of the clutter, I had a flash of agony, the agony of asking for so little, pressed against the backdrop of my entire future. I imagined the requests shrinking and the agony growing until it was too late.
“A fantasy is supposed to be an escape from normalcy, not a fetish for it,” Mom said.
I cracked open my twelfth grime-covered storage bin to find a doll laying on top. The doll was a young girl with my stringy brown hair and oversized eyes, wearing a plaid tunic much like the ones I’d grown up in. The doll was me frozen in time. Except it was partially devoured, almost certainly the work of rats. I gagged. And here I had thought I’d built a tolerance at this point in the day.
“Jesus, look at this thing,” I cringed, holding it out by its little arm. “I can probably just trash this, right?”
She beamed when she saw it, like I’ve seen people do in movies when they meet someone at the airport. She had reunited with a long lost friend.
“You kidding me? I can’t part with that,” she laughed.
“The rats have already had at it. Might as well call her Baby’s First Bubonic Plague,” I said. She just reached out her hands toward it, speechlessly gest-