You’re dressed like a pickle and you’ve never in your life felt such opulent androgyny. The pickle has green prickly arms and soft puffy hands and feet like two boxes of Kleenex. The pickle wears a fancy gold chain and fat emerald rings and round red eye glasses in the vain of Elton John or maybe Harry Potter. You would like the pickle to be a Vlasic pickle because when you were little you imagined the stork on the jar could whisk you away to someplace like Paris or the Hoover Dam, but they tell you this pickle is brand neutral and please don’t name-brand the pickle or speak to anyone while mobilizing about as the pickle. The pickle is a promotional pickle that performs promotional tasks with other performative fruits and vegetables at the supermarket. You will be a mute, fancy-neuter pickle. You will pass out pamphlets on the importance of ingesting the likes of yourself. You are a pickle in a pickle. You need health insurance now in case your appendix explodes or your intestines twist up or you take a spill running and your femur pops out of your shin like a prop skeleton from a coffin. But mostly you need it because you have anterograde amnesia. You have no memory of how this happened to you and suspect it may have something to do with the man who is dressed as an onion because he got you the pickle job. He helps you to remember things like that you ate beets yesterday so your red pee shouldn’t scare you and that he is your boyfriend. But you can’t be so sure he is your boyfriend because would you have dated an onion that makes innocuous statements about inclement weather and has the album art from Dark Side of the Moon tattooed on his calf? Yesterday he said a supercell capable of producing F-1 tornadoes is expected to hit near Salina and maybe you’d like to go there because apparently you chased threatening clouds in the before times. But now you are performative pickle in a pickle who enjoys feeling lavishly unsexed and just hopes to see a doctor about short-term memories slipping away like warm rain through wrought iron storm grates. Or maybe you already have.
Casey Jo Graham Welmers grew up in rural northern lower Michigan near the lake of the same name. She holds a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan and a BSN from Oakland University. She practices written and healing arts from the Great Lakes state while dreaming of many happy returns to the Sonoran desert. You can find her at caseyjo.carrd.co