Dry Lips

I told Samantha I’d eat my hat if she could convince our parents, who’ve been divorced for twenty-two years, to get back together. I said this jokingly, thinking that her vow to undo Mom and Dad’s divorce, the thing that her and I agreed scared us worse than anything, was also a joke. But she was serious.

Last month our parents got married—or remarried, I guess—and during the ceremony I could feel Samantha staring at me with I-told-you-so eyes while clutching my favorite hat, a cap in U.S. colors that says Mayor of Titty City, a hat I haven’t worn since college (I don’t wear hats anymore).

She told me she confiscated a volume of dark arts spells from two of her high school students and couldn’t for the life of her put it down on some nights. I didn’t believe her, which is to say I neither believed in the dark arts nor her owning a book that claims to house its techniques. However, Mom and Dad hated each other’s guts for as long as I can remember, way before they actually separated, and now they’re together again. I suspected that, decades after Samantha and I grew up and made our own way in the world, our parents grew bored after an extended period of living alone or dating unsuccessfully, decided that no one else would be willing to deal with their bullshit besides each other, and slowly rekindled a flame long since extinguished, keeping Samantha in the loop and not me. Then she decided to let me know of this astonishing development by fucking with my head, and because I jokingly said I’d eat my hat, she became hellbent on making me do so out of pure sport. 

I refused to literally eat a hat, of course. I’m forty-three. I’m too old to follow through with childish bets. I did, however, visit my parents, who now live in the house Mom won in the settlement. They sat together on the couch in the living room with the TV serving as background noise. I asked them when they started seeing each other again.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Dad said. “It hasn’t been that long, right dear?”

“February 15^th, dear,” Mom said. “6pm on the dot.” They got married February 26^th.

“You’re so smart, my love. That’s why I love you.”

“And you’re so cute, my love. That’s why I love you.”

I asked them something else, but they started kissing so I left before it got anymore awkward.

Later that day Samantha texted me a photo of my hat on a dinner plate in between a fork and a bottle of barbeque sauce.

For three days I staked out the high school Samantha taught at while the kids were being picked up in the afternoon, looking for two kids who looked creepy enough to have an interest in dark magic. The whole time I waited for someone—a teacher or kid or even a parent—to knock on my window and ask if I were a pedophile because my car wasn’t by the curb where all the other parents who picked up their kids drove up to. But no. Adults, I figured, are too annoyed with having to pick up their freeloading children to care about their surroundings. And kids, of course, are too stupid to care about their surroundings. 

On the third day I finally spotted two token goth girls from among the sea of children. They made these faces as they spoke to each other as if every word uttered was filled with snark and sarcasm. The shorter goth girl was picked up by a parent, while the chunky, less loved one waited for the bus.

I followed the bus she got on, maintaining a two-car-length distance to not give myself away like a YouTube video I watched a while back told me. Finally the goth girl and some other brat got off the bus and walked down a neighborhood where a lot of the lawns weren’t mowed. The other kid crossed the street immediately, probably to get away from the goth. I drove up to the goth girl and got out of my car, and for just a second I thought how easy it would be to kidnap someone’s child if I really wanted to. But I’m not that kind of person.

“Hey, kid,” I said, “you know Ms. Gribble, right?”

“Yes?” she responded, obviously afraid of me.

“Did she by chance take a magic book away from you a month ago?”

“You mean my Rituals of the Dark Arts Volume 1? Yeah, that fucking bitch stole it from me in front of the entire class. Now I’m failing geometry because of that cunt.”

“Don’t you dare talk about my sister that way,” I said, raising a fist above my head as if I was about to punch her. 

“Oh my God get away from me!” she cried, then ran away.

Samantha invited me for dinner at her apartment, which is something we’ve always done once in a while, so I had no reason to not come despite knowing she hadn’t forgotten about the hat thing. When she opened the door to let me in I noticed her eyes were bloodshot and her skin was pallid. It freaked me out, but she otherwise gossiped about work and how certain student and other teachers as she normally did when I see her. I, too, gossiped about my job (neither of us had anything else going on in our lives) to keep myself from telling her she looked like death, knowing I should always voice genuine concern for my sister’s well-being. Instead, as she stirred a huge steaming pot of what smelled like stew on the stove, I searched through her belongings for anything that looked like a dart arts magic book. 

“So, did you get a chance to see Mom and Dad recently?” she asked, yelling this because she heard me wonder off.

“Yeah,” I said. “They look great.” Her bedsheets were disheveled under a clutter of unopened mail. Nothing on her bookshelf save a collection of fantasy novels I know she hasn’t read. 

“Like they’re a bunch of hormonal teens, huh?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. On her nightstand stood little wooden box filled with handwritten love letters from her college sweetheart she cheated on. “The visit didn’t last long. They forgot I was there after a while.”

“Uh-huh,” she said smugly. “Like magic.”

“Oh, don’t start that shit again,” I said. There was a sex toy under her bed and an open bag of chips further underneath. 

“You still don’t believe me, do you? How else could they have gotten back together?”

“I don’t know, but I feel like I’m being punked or something.” Nothing unusual in her bathroom, although I didn’t know she had so many antidepressants in her medicine cabinet.

“What are you doing over there?”

“Nothing. Taking a fat dump.”

“Well, hurry up. Food’s ready.”

Samantha placed a dinner place in front of me as soon as I took a seat at her thrift store kitchen table, along with a fork and knife.

“I thought you were making soup,” I said.

“Nope,” she said, and walked back to the stove. The pot she cooked with was larger than I thought. She grasped both handles, and as she hobbled with it to the table I thought about offering to lend her a hand, but she didn’t ask for help so I didn’t say anything. With a thud, she dropped the pot by my plate, with drops of boiling hot water sprinkling my face. She used a ladle to scoop up and plop onto the plate my Mayor of Titty City hat and chopped carrots and potatoes. The hat looked soggy like wet bread. It blinked open angry looking eyes on the crown, and the visor opened up to fashion a mouth with bear teeth.  The thing wiggled in place, making growling noises.

“Bon appétit,” Samantha said. I looked at her. Her crusty bottom lip quivered and she seemed to be on the verge of tears. My eyes traveled to the kitchen counter next to the stove, where a thick book sat halfway open. I figured that was the dark arts book, which apparently doubled as a cookbook. I looked back at the hat that proved the existence of the supernatural. It shook and growled more fiercely as it slowly melted it a murky green puddle that discolored the once appetizing potatoes and carrots. I looked back at Samantha, who still stared at me with pitiful eyes. Her skin was cracking; a flake peeled and fell from her cheek. At this point it was too late for me to say anything about it since I didn’t say something earlier.

“Can you pass me the salt?” I asked. Her food notoriously lacked salt. She grimaced, yet perhaps lacked the strength to retort as she normally would and instead retrieved a little can of salt without saying a word.

The hat, in fact, tasted like meat, albeit slightly spoiled. When I first cut into it it made a horrible scream, so I stabbed it with the knife until it stopped. Despite its melting appearance it was chewy and hard to swallow without something to drink. The potatoes and carrots were too mushy. The salt helped a little. Factoring in both taste and presentation, this was among Samantha’s top three worst meals ever.

She sat opposite of me, watching me eat, and if it wasn’t for her seeming to need me to eat the hat I would have dumped it in the trash were it belonged. I felt bothered after I finished, not because the food was bad or that I knew I’d throw it up soon afterward, but because she prepared an entire meal just for me, which meant I had to put forth the effort of preparing an entire meal just for her. I made a mental note to research foods that cause food poisoning when I got home.

“I did it,” she said with a sigh of relief.

“Huh?” 

“I fulfilled my end of the deal. The tome is no longer angry with me.” There was a pause. “Do I look as awful as I feel right now?”

“Samantha, Mom and Dad aren’t worth this kind of trouble.”