I wallow home from the nearby café, my pancake belly leading, my sausage belly thudding with each step, my eggs over easy belly yoking my intestines, liver, kidneys, in grease—solid, thick, yellow. Crow follows me in the rain, cawing. When I stop for a break to catch my breath, he perches on a low oak branch. He gazes at my belly. Usually, it’s faces they remember. But my belly is the most recognizable thing about me: its up and down heaving on an incline, its greedy collection of visceral fat as I toss in bed unable to sleep, its bass beat when my grandson and I used to dance together to Raffi’s song, “Shake a Toe.”

Crow ruffles his wings, cawing repeatedly. Rapid, harsh. Ko-aw, ko-aw he screeches, thrusting his head up and down. He’s angry with me after my indulgent breakfast. 

“I know, I know,” I tell him as the rain picks up and I start moving again. Crow stays behind. I tighten the hood on my yellow slicker that my wife, Maggie, bought me 18 months ago, the last time we shopped together. I told her I looked like a school bus in it. Fat people should not wear yellow. “Well, you’re my school bus,” she said. “And besides, yellow is the color of joy.”

That’s what I’d been thinking when I buttered my toast, when I poured buckets of golden syrup on my pancakes, when I ate my eggs. I feed Crow only healthy snacks. Apples and grapes, avocados, walnuts, almonds. Lemons from my tree. No salt or sugar. No processed food. That’s for me. Crow wants me to lose weight. Some might say our relationship is purely transactional. I feed him. He keeps me company and brings me gifts. If I keel over of a stroke or heart attack, he’ll be stuck eating insects, small mammals, carrion. But aren’t all relationships transactional in small ways?

Actually, no. Maggie gave and gave and gave. Homemade lemon meringue pie, assurances she loved me and found me attractive in spite of my weight, gentle nudges—the gentlest!—to help me lose some pounds. Such a celebration the two times I lost big time! Such quiet acceptance when I put even more back on. She made lemon bars that time she found me naked in front of a mirror, hitting myself. I think it was a kind of sad giving up. 

I gave her a fat husband tethered to a computer for work. Plenty of love. 50% of a son we adored, a son who told me he had to take a long break from me. “It’s too hard,” he said, “watching you destroy yourself. Especially after Mom’s death.” 

I walk up my front steps oh so carefully, clutching the rail, careful not to slip in the rain. Opening the door, I see Crow’s gifts in a cobalt blue and turquoise bowl on my entry way table. Yellow tissue paper, colorful pieces of plastic, a gold earring, a key, a button, a beak carved wine cork. Maggie gave me that Kintsugi bowl when her cancer metastasized. She wanted me to see beauty in the broken. I stand there dripping, running my fingers over the gold seams. 

Crows live only 7-8 years. I have no idea how old my crow is. When will he give me the last gift? Last, last, last. 

The last time I shared a meal with my son was 54 days ago. I used to have Sunday dinner with his family. My grandson and I danced together; he was too young to see what a fool I looked. That last dinner—my son’s laser eyes as he watched me slice butter for my mashed potatoes. My thoughts whirlpooling—no slice would be thin enough for him to approve. 

The last anything doesn’t announce itself. Like the last time I held a bowl of sliced lemons to Maggie’s face. “Breath in,” I told her. “Breathe deeply.” I’d learned that the scent of lemons can help with nausea from chemo. Poor Maggie; I was always thrusting a bowl of lemons under her nose. 

She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Then she accidentally snorted. We laughed. God, how we laughed.

+++

Claudia Monpere’s flash appears in Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, Craft, Flash Frog, Trampset, The Forge, and elsewhere. She won the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review, the Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine, and the 2023 Smokelong Workshop Prize. She has stories in Best Small Fictions 2024 and 2025 and Best Microfiction 2025.