Coop fills a bowl with water and places it on the floor. He feeds Pinky cracker packets and bites from his meals. No nuggets, of course. Never nuggets. He has sworn off nuggets and dactyl wings and dactyl noodle soup. He picks from the Millennial Nostalgia Menu instead: avocado toast (with faux-avocado paste the texture of Play-Doh) and kale smoothies made from a powdered mix (chalky but nutritious). He even dares to order the crispy roasted Brussels sprouts, which he used to love long ago. He tries to be discreet when he brings leftovers to his room. The others have never seen him eat so much. They probably suspect something is going on. He locks his door even more fervently. When he goes into the hallway, he checks for feathers. He is forever finding downy tufts in his clothes and hair.
He talks to Pinky.
He never knew he had so much to say.
He sits in his chair and she sits at his feet, and he tells her about his wife. How he knew right away. How he deleted the dating app in the middle of their first date, how she played bass in a band, how he believed they would die in each other’s arms, or not at all.
And his daughter. The world was so big in her eyes. He took her camping when she was eight and though she complained all through the hike, she was mesmerized by the campfire, gazing into it, trying to learn its secrets, the way cavegirls must have done for thousands of years. They roasted potatoes in foil packs, half-raw, half-burned, yet somehow perfect. How clear the sky was that night when he showed her the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and Cassiopeia the Queen. He told her the truth about stars—how the pinpoints of light that looked like neighbors were, in reality, located in entirely different galaxies, separated by vast space, by dark matter. It was only from an earthbound perspective that the stars appeared to align so perfectly, forming images and stories and meaning. How important it had felt to impart that ancient wisdom to her, to pass on the celestial mythology.
Decades later, he tells Pinky, when the tube came out and they waited for his wife to take her place in the cosmic order of things, he learned that it could take minutes or hours or days. There was no way to know. The cruelty of the waiting, the cruelty of letting nature take its course. It took weeks. It took until the very moment his daughter burst into the hospital men’s room shouting to hurry, that it was happening right now, and she dragged him to the. bedside with piss on his pants, but his wife was already gone, his embrace too late to matter. How he forgets both their names on purpose, now. How it’s safer to catalog them alongside other lost objects: Keys. Ring. Daughter. Wife.