The morning Kenny died was humid and yellow. Something was wrong with the windows. They sweated from the inside. The air felt like spit.
Kenny ran headfirst into the wall and his head exploded.
There was blood on his bedroom drywall, and a kind of pink mist in the air when I got home, still sticky, like someone sprayed a watermelon through a hose. Bits of his scalp and hair clung to the popcorn ceiling.
I’d seen Kenny run before. He’d always challenge me to foot races in the apartment. Always a dead sprint. Always cutting it just short of an inch from the wall. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised he went that extra inch.
I can’t remember how long I stood there. Eventually, I noticed the smell that permeated throughout the apartment wasn’t blood, shit, or brain matter, but the scent of warm seasoned chicken and buttery white rice. I followed it to the kitchen, where Kenny, in some final moment of domesticity, had meal-prepped thirty days of chicken and rice.
Kenny would get these bursts of energy, like someone plugged him in wrong. So, maybe this was just another episode, an hour of fiercely chopping and portioning until some random neuron fired and told him to dead sprint into eternity. Or maybe it was deliberate. Maybe he thought all that uneaten food would mess with me, knowing I can’t throw anything out without feeling like I’m killing it twice.
The counter was stacked with off-brand Tupperware labeled in Sharpie: Day 1, Day 2, all the way to Day 30. There wasn’t a Day 24, Day 23 had been accidentally written twice and instead of Day 25, it was labeled “Oops! Hehe :)” Day 30 didn’t feel conclusive. It just said Day 30.
I probably should’ve called someone. I think part of me liked him there. His door was shut behind him. I wasn’t ready to open it again. The wall was still pulsing like it remembered the impact. So I did what I could handle. I opened Day 1. Chicken and rice. Raisins in the rice. I ate it cold out on my porch. Someone screamed “Fuck you!” In the direction of the BQE. I chewed slowly. The chicken wasn’t as dry as I thought. It was surprisingly tender. I thought “This man smashed his head in, but still remembered to debone the thighs.”
By Day 3, I’d stopped checking the blood splatter. It dried into a kind of textured mural. I only noticed when the light hit it just right and something inside me twitched. I microwaved the rice this time.
Days blurred and the meals hardly varied. Sometimes they had turmeric, or saffron. Some kind of yellow that didn’t feel entirely food based. On Day 8 I remembered one particular race. Kenny had been barefoot, grinning wild, and he’d leaned into the final few feet so hard I thought he was going to do it then. But he stopped short. Breathless. Said, “One day I’m not stopping.” I’d laughed.
By Day 15 the wall was almost part of the décor. The dent where his skull met plaster was shallow but precise, like a thumbprint in clay. I microwaved Day 15’s chicken, added soy sauce.
Day 23 made me gag. The chicken was undercooked, pink at the joint. I finished it anyway, on the floor, knees up, chewing slow.
I opened up Day 30. Plain boiled chicken. Rice without salt. It tasted like resignation. I ate it all. Licked the fork clean. Sat with the empty container in my lap for an hour, staring at the dent in the wall.
I didn’t clean the wall. Didn’t touch his door. I sat there a while, lights off, letting the room get darker until the dent in the plaster disappeared. At some point, I realized I was holding the fork like a weapon, pressing the tines into my palm until it hurt just enough to remind me I was still here.
Eventually I stood, put on a coat, walked to the store. Bought chicken thighs, jasmine rice, and, without thinking, a bag of raisins. On the way back, I imagined the thirty neat containers lined up again, Kenny somewhere just behind me, crouched like a sprinter, waiting for the gun.
Back in the kitchen, I set the water to boil. Dropped in the first cup of rice. The splash was soft, almost polite, like someone clapping at the wrong time.
