By Anna Jollyette Rogers

Sometimes, when I’m home alone, I lick my plate clean. I usually wouldn’t think about that here, not in public, especially not in a restaurant, where everyone would look at me as if I were already an animal. I can’t think of anything more animal than dying, and I can’t help but think that if I’d flattened my tongue against the porcelain and sponged up those last beads of sauce, maybe I’d already be dead.

I’m not dead yet, so the waiter clears my plate. I thank him, open her contact, and press call. As I lift the phone to my ear and listen to it ring, I watch the reflections of the diners across the restaurant, wavering in the strip of mirrors that circle the room at eye-level. They’re an older couple, and I imagine they come here all the time. I know I’m an aberrance to their familiar scene even before I catch the wife’s eyes, just briefly as she leans forward to say something to her husband, who pauses, a shred of noodle suspended in his chopsticks.

I figure the woman is also tracking my reflection, its skin blotched red and purple like the face of a child after excavating their mother’s makeup. Or maybe she just told her husband I’m being rude to my date.

My date does have the compressed expression of a man who’s experiencing a first date that will become a story—not the kind that answers the question how did you meet, but the kind brought up occasionally to assure someone else that, by comparison, their dating life really isn’t that bad. 

I wonder how he’ll tell it, if the story will start when I looked fine or when I told him that my throat was becoming too tight and itchy to ignore. I still looked fine then, as many dying people tend to do, at least for a bit. The climax will probably be when I lifted my skirt, jabbed a needle into my thigh, and said, “I’m sorry,” before calling the paramedics. Maybe he’ll leave out the apology, if he’s kind. I’d immediately regretted it.

And he probably won’t tell anyone this part—maybe because he’s kind or this seems mundane to him, a thing that could happen to anyone from time to time. Oh yeah, and the girl’s mother didn’t pick up.

“You have reached—”

I hang up on the automated voice and try to text call me, but my delinquent thumbs, vibrating from the epinephrine, create an entirely different string of letters. I don’t understand the weakness that has entered my fingers until I try to hold down the delete key and the phone drops to the table, the screen landing facedown on the laminate surface.

It feels like flipping a coin, though I’m not sure what for. Most questions swell beyond a yes or no—beyond two possibilities—but if I think long enough, maybe everything can be that simple. Will I live or die? Will my mother call me back?

She’s only ever called me once. As soon as I picked up she said, “Everything’s fine,” and I knew nothing was fine, even before she used words like malignant and lymph nodes and spreading, words then eclipsed by a story about a new blender. The blender had nine different settings.

“Drink some water,” my date repeats, refilling my glass from the pitcher he’d requested. He tells me hydration is good for anaphylaxis, that it’ll flush out my system. He read this somewhere, and I think I might have too. It’s not supposed to be that helpful. 

I look away from him to concentrate on lifting the glass. I can feel streams of water breaking from the corners of my lips, an eddy forming in the narrowing channel of my throat. I think of those claustrophobic slides at water parks and a video I once saw about the salmon cannon. Men in waders loaded thick, rubbery fish into a chute. The fish were instantly sucked in. Their bodies seemed pinched by the slender tube, though the video’s narration insisted the fish remained unharmed as they shot over dams blocking the rivers they’d traversed for millennia.

I try to ask my date if he’s ever heard of the salmon cannon. From the look on his face and the feeling of my tongue and lips closing incompletely around the sounds, I quickly understand that even if he knows about the salmon cannon, what I’m saying does not describe it or anything else.

I rest the glass on my lips again and only sense the spillage when my lap grows cold. As I lift my arm, it feels both leaden and trembling with new life. Neither feeling makes it mine, but I manage to press it unsteadily against my face, wiping the length of my forearm along my chin, soaking up a toddler-like mess.

Two figures approach our table, their outlines too rigid to be the waiter. Their uniforms are so crisp that I almost can’t believe these are the people who regularly put themselves at risk of being covered in bile and blood. They are either excellent professionals or I’ve called the wrong people. Still, I want to tell them they don’t have to worry about what fluids might leak from me. This is just water. My concerns are all internal.

I can’t say anything before their hands are gently cupping my shoulders and legs, lifting me onto the stretcher I hadn’t noticed dragging behind them. I try to recall the last time anyone picked me up. Unsupported, my head droops, and the older couple center in my grainy vision. I can see well enough to catch the details, the husband’s horn-rimmed glasses adjusted on his face, the oily stain on the wife’s collar to match the sheen of their forgotten dinners.

“Don’t worry about me,” I want to tell them. “Everything’s fine.”