Associate Editor Andy Sia: Sarah Chin’s story navigates the sticky terrain of grief. Pained, the narrator ventures nonetheless beyond the humdrum of daily life in an attempt to recover meaning and connection. Mirroring and amplifying the narrator’s process of becoming unstuck, objects displace from their familiar contexts: a mozzarella stick is akin to an altar, and a dolphin with tiny, perfect flippers leaps into view to give counsel.

Listen to Chin read her piece:

Valedictorian

The time it takes for a mozzarella stick to cool is a holy unit of thinking. That’s what I’m eating for dinner, because it’s Sunday, and I don’t need to be “well” until tomorrow. When I ate my sticks last night, I burned my tongue, and when I sucked it, I tasted everyone I’d ever kissed. 

I have an ex named Trouble. We broke up after a disagreement about time zones. It was amicable but sometimes I dream about her thigh tattoo: “Call your mother,” inked in curling script above a dolphin with an M16 clutched in its tiny, perfect flippers. 

Last week, my therapist asked me what the word mother meant to me. I told her it meant egg salad and bad Wi-Fi. She wrote a bunch of things down after I said that. More trouble, surely. She says I’m in the process of becoming unstuck, like I’m old gum or a failed thought experiment. “Schrödinger’s Valedictorian. That’s me,” I say to my framed high school diploma hanging limply in the entryway, just above the urn.  

Have you ever seen your mother in a dream and she’s just—vibing? Eating Funyuns? And you wish she were doing something meaningful so you could throw your poor therapist a bone? Or really, just have any idea why now? Especially given the fact that the last time you saw her, she was in an open casket, and you were twenty but felt two.  

When I was twenty, I still believed in progress. I believed even after my father gave me the urn because he “couldn’t bear to look at it.” At the time, I thought I would just be taking the semester off, just to make sure he kept eating and sleeping and occasionally left the house. I would be back in the fall. Then I met Trouble, and now my father lives in Sarasota with a woman named Lorene. So I guess progress exists for some of us.  

Now I’m a twenty-five-year-old temp and not sure what I believe in. Because of that, I’ve been thinking about how to become my own mother. I googled it and ended up on a kink site’s message board for adult babies. Then on a subreddit for plastic surgery fetishists. One of the posts was titled “Be the breast you wish to see in the world.” So I guess that’s where I am now—trying to be the breast. Trying to be the world. 

Tomorrow I will go to work and nod thoughtfully in meetings. I will forward spreadsheets and say “see attached” even though everyone can already see it. I will eat a salad for lunch and feel nothing. But that is a problem for another me, because right now, my mozzarella sticks are the perfect temperature, and somewhere, a dolphin with an assault rifle is urging me to pick up the phone. 

So I do. I call myself and listen to the busy tone drone on and on and on. 

Sarah Chin is a writer with a day job in politics. Her work has been published in Epiphany, HAD, SmokeLong Quarterly, Points in Case, Sine Theta Magazine, and more. She lives in Chicago, Illinois and can be found at sarahchin.net.

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