Bisquick (Cody Kucker)

Because Bisquik and Mrs. Butterworth's were the effigies of his impeccable attendance throughout his public (and for that matter, private, but for three days he missed for appendicitis as a sophomore in college) schooling and more so, because they were handed him---hot and always freshly lathed in yet absorbed syrup---by his mother each of those two-thousand two-hundred and twenty mornings, twelve minutes before the yellow buses would fill the bottom right square of the kitchen door's nine-pane-window, he was on the subway landing watching the snow melt off the canopy, beading down like partitions in incense shops.
The last time it was fifty-two degrees in December was the first day Mrs. Cassidy was absent. She had left instructions for the sub to take her third grade class outside to the copse behind the school dumpster to deduce and tally the species of plant-life. He remembered being aggravated by the absurdity of this task, by the impossibility of any semblance of accuracy, considering the lack of a key ingredient, namely, the leaves. That was on a Wednesday and Mrs. Cassidy never returned. He ended up seeing her much later, on this same landing, three benches, two barrels, and twenty-six steps to the right of where he now stood, watching the drainage form chutes that flecked gold mid-way down before slipping back to silver.
It was nineteen months and six days ago, in May, when he saw Mrs. Cassidy. She wore a sleeveless blouse, blue from her shoulders to the top of her breasts, where it fizzled into purple and then into pink just above her waist, which continued, unfazed, to the forest green hem that ran across her thighs. White termite paths were patterned from her unshaved armpits, down her ribs, to her hips. She was sitting, legs crossed beneath a brown skirt that reached the middle of her shin and draped obliquely to where it gathered behind the heel of her leather sandal; sipping an iced coffee, sunglasses tugging the roots of her black hair that crashed onto the bench. The twenty-six steps actually took him two-persons worth of a bench beyond where Mrs. Cassidy was sitting, to the third barrel, in which he deposited a gum wrapper and to validate his assumption.

"What are these?"
"They're pancakes…scallion-potato cakes to be more exact. A little well done on the bottom, or the top," she giggled , "you want crushed tomato?"
"Do you have ketchup?"
She gasped amenably and then felt uncomfortable, opening and crouching into the fridge as a gesture, closing it, telling him it didn't look like it, and retained a casualness en-route her bedroom, while he sat with his hands folded, looking out the window at the specks of planes entering the sky, on average, every…but she, of course, returned promptly as to avoid meaning. The stove continued to tink as it cooled and the smell of cooking oil congealed.
"Do you have pancake pancakes?"
"I don't do that Bisquick shit---I have to spend enough time at the gym as it is."
Definitive and stoic and "impossible. Impossible," he said.
She laughed again and went into the bathroom. He put on his coat and closed the front door lightly while she washed her hands, and from the hall heard the heh of hey gloss the kitchen.

He took seven steps to the doors that opened to his right, it would've been five to the left, he presumed---never approximating, approximation as weakness, a despicable A for effort at best---, but there was a row of four empty seats against the opposite window where he'd be able to spread his arms out across the top of the vacant seats beside him and cross his legs comfortably. It had taken practice to sit with his legs crossed as thinkers did, as thinkers do. This was one of his first thoughts, or what he considered to be thought, that which shined a light at something just beyond its reach, or otherwise, was within it but unable to be captured by the waves; that which particles of any kind could not collect upon. This was the posture for it, the posture of the driver and the driven.
Mrs. Cassidy was a thinker, he thought, now, today, reconsidering her disappearance and recollecting the way she let the light suture her face despite all the gray it collected squeezing between the four family houses across from the bench where she awaited the train; a look with a willingness to leave---obviously, he chided himself----but not just because she did. Julie was a sloucher, a fit one nonetheless. She didn't sit to think but rather, seemingly, to call a call with the waft she let with her legs spread---her sweat salting and spreading like silky lichen where her skeleton veered into limbs, head phones out and behind her shoulders, still singing---a call to be filled, a passive cask intangible things could be placed in and safely remain so. Sabine, Sabine, on the other hand, could not sit, chopping scallions---scallions.

He was sympathetic of the sleepers on the train and seemed to be attempting to check his own romanticism by pushing his glasses into the bridge of his nose and blinking his eyes harshly behind the lenses, only to take them off right after to rub the spot where the pincers dug. He did this repeatedly, daily, though at different times therein, whenever lights would catch things and prove them thoughtless. The skin rubbed ruddy by his fingers would swell, faintly, when he relented his hand, spilling the way of his head, and meet the plum beneath his eyes, giving him a look of convalescence when he lifted his cleared orifices to the ceiling light, before looking straight ahead again, and then askance at the other passengers with just his eyes, and then undergoing the process again.
He categorized the sleepers: the Latino men (he could not decipher between Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, except on the highways when he could look at which air-freshening national flag hung from their rear-view mirrors) slept the best and the Asian men (whom he also could not decipher between, and very rarely saw driving) thought deeply with their eyes closed; the grizzled white men passed out. And the other patrons, the ones who wore head phones, they dreamed, and those who read books would quickly become grave and pallid, whether this was due to the light or content he could not conclude (in London, it was because of teeth and always breathing with their mouths closed). And there were those who read magazines, who typically chewed gum, and the ones who didn't gaped only to be instantly and harmlessly resolved.

Red is the color of his gratitude and the pin stripes of his shirt. 'On the One-Hundred and Thirty-Fifth Day of Sixth Grade in 1992, Twelve Days, Sixteen Hours, Forty-Seven Minutes, and Decreasing Seconds Starting from Forty-Two from [His] Twelfth Birthday'' (as was the title of his journal entry on that day, a trend he continued for twelve more days and countless seconds, at which point he ceased to title at all), [his] favorite color [was] red. And upon dotting the period, he put the pen down and proceeded to shout, 'my favorite color is red! My favorite! color is red!' and his mother would hear, as he knew she would--and did--as, after that, he received a red jacket for his birthday and for every birthday thereafter has received a red item.
One year, the schools had prohibited the use of red pens for grading, and he, being well under way in his teaching preparation program at the time, received from his mother, being the thoughtful and loving woman she was, a single (very expensive) lacquered Redwood pen, bowed, of course, with a red ribbon. It didn't matter what it was, it was red, and he knew this, and she smiled coyly until he was able to get beyond the toll of expectation and laugh with her in their exclusive but contagious way. Last year it was a thick---good and durable---plastic serving spoon.
So he wore red shirts or at least shirts with red in them (most of them, of course, bought for him over the years by his wonderful mother) as a modest act of nobility and gratitude. He wished, at times, to tell people this, the principal in particular. He sometimes wished to say 'how could that be, consider this, consider this,’ but that would be profane. He noticed a Latino sleeper---a man that had earned his sleep by cocking some primitive tool, day in and day out, and saving the machines from choking on the dust verdant in the void where bodies used to be----; a sleeper who had awoken and was staring at his torso, and the sympathy was gone, usurped by what he thought to be pride, the quiet and commendable kind. 'Scallion potato cakes,' he thought, 'scallion potato cakes,' and he finally laughed.