Alphabet Soup
It is six in the morning, and I am eating cold alphabet soup. I flick the spoon in a cycle with fingers that itch to pull a blanket back over my body. My other hand robotically writes equations across a notebook. The sun has not yet risen, so I shiver in the indifferent light of the kitchen. I am sitting in a tank top that reveals scars across my heart as I listen to my freezing breath rasp from my trembling throat.
While I sit, I stir in rhythm to the clock in my head. The letters swirl tiredly around as the kitchen light bathes the soup red, dying it the crimson of blood and sweat and tears. Absentmindedly, I let my numb cheek fall into an open palm. My teardrop eyes slowly fall with my face and sink into sleep.
When I open my eyes, I am floating in the bowl of alphabet soup. My hands are clutching an “A” in a sea of pasta letters. I am spinning endlessly with the spoon’s current and choking back nausea as it tosses me from school to homework to sleep and back again. Minutes pass in a blur, and I see shadows pass under the pasta.
I am drowning. I vaguely remember a mis-step – a slip that turned into a tumble that sent me falling from my A. I am dragged down by silver medals and chains, and when voices call out that I am not defined by letters, I kick through frigid soup to hear them. But my hope of being rescued shrivels when those same voices throw letters at my head. I flinch away and splash under the red light that envelops me like a cold sun. I struggle to stay afloat while liquid laps at my throat and threatens to freeze my voice.
I turn to a raft of As and shout a strangled greeting across the lake. The girl atop the letters looks at me and paddles over.
“A B isn’t that bad,” she tells me, but I see the B-shaped hole in her raft and know she is not talking to me. Everyone in this miserable soup has glassy eyes.
There are parents yelling at some of the people on rafts. I watch as the words hurl into the sides of the letter and shake the soup’s surface. Groups of girls and boys huddle together on the edges of the bowl and cry in solidarity. Some kind souls pull others into their rafts while they build new ones.
“Why do you care so much?” I ask one girl as she passes by, padding frantically to avoid the letters being hurled into the arena.
“I’m nothing without the letters,” she says, eyes darting everywhere.
“But you’re more than letters.” Parroted words. Stolen words. Empty, useless words,
“And I can’t survive without them. Do you want to stay and sink and find out what happens to people without letters?” she asks.
It is still six in the morning, only now the sun has begun to rise. Some survivors in the ocean of alphabet soup greet the new day with groans. Others smile through a sleepless night and throw back their heads to laugh, because what else can they do? All of them reach for the others and take solace in knowing they are not the only refugees who endure these lonely early hours.
I awaken with a jolt, and my swollen eyes fly open. My frozen lungs gasp for air. I am at the kitchen table again. Soup splatters across lined notebook paper. The sun burns the chilly layer of frost from the air, and I hear birds sing, although their songs sound sad and distant in my waterlogged ears.
I feel a lump on my tongue. Curious, I pluck the small piece of pasta from my blue lips. My mother’s voice calls for me, and I smile with my mouth instead of my eyes. After all, I can still lie with my lips. I tell her that I am fine, really, I was just studying for a test. I assure her that I will do well.
I am still swimming in alphabet soup. I cannot stop; I cannot drown. I clutch that little letter “A” in a fist and leave the cold alphabet soup sitting on the stained-red table, knowing that it will be waiting for me when I return the next morning.