The Cheese Was Unrepentant

I’ve had surgery on my face.

When I tell people that, they get excited, imagining, perhaps, a disfiguring car accident. 

In actuality, it isn’t anything to get excited about: they just needed to fix a malfunctioning tear duct.  Of course, it didn’t work, this fixing, but that didn’t keep them billing me the equivalent of, say, a yacht payment. 

I went in, they doped me up, broke my nose, set it, introduced a length of fine plastic tubing and voila, as we used to say, fish and chips.

I awoke in Post-Op, drunk on anesthesia.  The world was whirling; the pain, painful. 

The time between “coming to” and finding myself at home, in my bed, cannot be measured.

My sister is leaning over me. 

“You there?”

I nod.

“You want to see?”  She is holding a mirror.

I nod. 

“You look ghastly,” she says.

And it’s true.  There is a plastic form up my nose, covered by a surprisingly bloody bandage.  There is another bandage, unbloodied, over my right eye.  There are splotches of dried blood on my cheeks, my chin.  I am breathing out of my mouth.

“I’b dry.”

She hands me a lemon drop.  I suck on it without the benefit of taste and salivate anyway.

“Do you remember that Dylan is at his dad’s ‘til Sunday?”

I nod.

“And that me and Kyle are going to a cabin?”

I nod again.

“I’ll be home in a week,” she says.  “You going to be okay?”

I hold up a thumb and its corresponding index finger:   A-OK.

“You got drugs?” she says.

“I dot a prescription,” I say.  I hold up a bottle of Tylenol 3. 

“Seriously?” she says.  “They break your nose and you get Tylenol 3?  We got cousins that get OxyContin just for being good liars.”

I lift both palms:  What are ya gonna do?

“Hmmm,” she says.

A friend visits the next day.  We sit on the porch, where she studiously avoids looking at my bloody bandages.  In a codeine-assisted haze, I listen to her read my horoscope.

“Today,” she reads, “is a good day for entertaining.”

I spend the rest of the day sleeping.

On the evening of the third day, I realize that I’ve eaten nothing but a bag of lemon drops since the day before the surgery. 

It is 3:30 in the morning.  The street is quiet.  The house is quiet.

My belly is decidedly not.

I wrap myself in a robe, hobble feebly to the kitchen.

The fridge is, essentially, empty.  There is a small container of curdled and/or curdling milk.  There is a jar of pickles that, strangely, has what may be a crouton floating in it.  There is a bottle of ketchup, a jar of capers, two open containers of Miracle Whip, both half-gone.

But wait – what’s that?  Behind the pickles is a ziplock-baggied container of shredded cheddar cheese.

Cheese!  I tear at the bag.  The fridge door open, its light washes over me, streams past my shaking hands, pools onto the linoleum floor.  I stare without seeing as I shovel cheese into my mouth. 

It is on the fourth fist full of dinner that I notice that my tongue feels funny.  I can’t taste anything, of course, but the feel…  There is something wrong with the feel of this cheese. This doesn’t really feel like cheddar.

Knowing what I will find, I look anyway.

The cheese in the bag is, conservatively, 80% mold.

And just like that, I’m not hungry anymore.