So there is a pie. Dad pushes a knife into the dish for a slice and Mom’s belly begins to bleed: her navel has turned into a blueberry, which sprouts legs and leaves. Dad plugs up the hole with a wine cork. The blueberry takes the knife and serves himself a slice of pie: the blueberry eats it and swells into my brother. He does a little dance like a magician might after a particularly impressive feat of escape; he even shouts tada! at the end. The four of us sit around talking about the pie, about the magic trick. He won’t tell how he did it, no one will tell how he did it.
Dad comes back to the pie for the slice he’d left earlier. He eats it and his body reshapes itself. Dad is a very large mirror. Brother goes to look at himself, and he transforms into Dad. This is unfair, because I was supposed to transform into Dad. Brother and I fight, viciously. We snarl and hiss and growl and circle one another in the kitchen. Then our throats start to hurt from all the guttural threats. Brother says he’s sorry and serves me a slice of pie.
I eat it and Mom starts to age rapidly. She shrivels up like a raisin until she is so small and wrinkled, we can’t even see her to apologize. We shout I love you! loudly so that Mom’s small raisin ears might hear us. In the dark, Brother and I wonder what sun did that.
Evan Williams is an undergraduate at The University of Chicago. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Heavy Feather Review, and Fourteen Poems, among others.