I woke up it was Wednesday and I made the coffee and prepared the lunchboxes, brushed the ants off the counter and the lunchbox was pink and plastic and needed extra scrubbing because oil clings to those surfaces. But I got it clean and put in the rice and the broccoli, carefully breaking each stem and placing just the crowns into the little containers, diagonally to each other so as to make good use of the space. Registered “tired” registered “morning” registered “normal.” Went to wake up my daughters.
Or I woke up on an aaaaa morning it was so iiiiii and the lunchboxes were oooooooo. The broccoli was oaoao and the oil and the stem and the crown were all broken and there were a lot of dust motes in the light drifting in from the gas god dream furnace millions of miles away and everything was uuuuuuuuuuuuuu was ayuyayuyayuya. Was AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
normal. Woke up my daughters who seemed less aaaaaaa for some reason. But I sure was.
Leftrightleftrightleftrighleft legslegslegslegs legs tapantenna tap antenna tap leftrightleftrightleftrightleft, to sugarsugarsugarsugarsugarsugar
Or it was the morning when the fish jumped out of the pan and swam around the room, when the pictures and their frames came unmoored and drifted into each other. When the sick man swallowed the vial of poison, tore up his signature on the prescription pad, pinned the pieces to the mirror and shot them and then screamed He! He! He! The one who poisoned me! Take him away take him away and they did and he knocked down all the walls and collapsed on his right side clutching his abdomen. And they made statues of him on his left side clutching his umbilical cord, being sure to capture the way his lips writhed in pain. And the statues were proclaimed healthy and whole and sane. And we all venerated them and put them on banknotes.
Or on this morning 48% or 49% to one side and 49% or 50% to the other give or take, of things on the screen, and because of this, everything had collapsed.
And the ants sugarsugarsugarsugar antenna antenna taptap right tap tap left.
Sugar, two spoons in my coffee and I went to wake up my daughters.
And the gasball called Sun squinted at the distant little yellow dot called Earth, and shook a little and belched out a jet of glowing plasma several thousand miles wide, then settled calmly down into its constant state of boiling rage, in the dark, in the cold, alone and unable to feel its own heat. “Normal” it thought “normal.”
And it was.
Since Ethan Stanton was six years old, he knew he had to be a writer. He has also always known that he has weird stuff in his head. It took the pressure cooker of pandemic parenting, along with the explosion of Zoom classes, for him to finally make the connection between those two things and start writing. He lives in San Jose, California where he is active in the open mic and slam scenes. His work has been published in Brawl, Vita Poetica, Dispatches from Quarantine, and Amethyst Review.