Pepperoni Logic by Christy Hemmingway

Prompt: slow steady breaths

I hand the pepperoni stick to my daughter, and she dissolves into a fit of tears. “It’s cold,” she cries, big crocodile drops of saltwater roll down her cheeks on command, saliva pooling in the corners of her lips. 

“Of course it’s cold; it came out of the fridge.” But even as I say it, I know the logic of the situation doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that every time she goes into the fridge to pull out a pepperoni stick—which is more often than I’d like, nitrates and all that—it is a cold stick of meat. 

Yesterday she was upset that the bathtub was wet. ​

This was my fault because she said she was going to have a bath, so I turned on the water, and two seconds later she said, no she just wanted a shower. 

I rubbed the bottom of the tub with a towel, but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t stand on that; it was once wet. She knew it had been wet, and the logic of the fact that when the water was turned on for her shower the whole thing would be wet, including her, made no difference.

We agreed on a bath. 

But tonight, I’m tired. She’s tired. I have things to do, a list to tick off, and she has different plans, so my responses are shorter. Curter. 

I resort to the only thing I know to do. “Let’s breathe,” I say. I grasp her tiny hands in mine; they're soft and warm, and maybe a little sticky. “In.” We both inhale deeply. “Out.” We blow the air through our lips; her breath is accompanied by a little spit and crumbs of the cheese biscuit she had taken a bite of before I handed her the offensively cold nitrate bullet.

This is the third time we are breathing together tonight. Some nights are just like that. This need for a reset. It’s as much for me as it is for her. A regulating of breaths, a lowering of our heart rates. The slowing of our reactions to each other. 

I leave her with her cheese biscuit and carry on with my “things”, that never-ending list of shit to get done. Some of it matters, probably…maybe. I’ll probably be grateful for the doing later. The temptation to numb out to a screen, to a mindless game, or doom scroll is strong. But then she says, “Mom, I’m full of this.” She holds out the half-eaten cheese biscuit. 

“What are you going to eat?”

She picks up the pepperoni stick, as if its temperature never offended her. “My pepperoni stick,” she says, and takes a bite. 

I nod and inhale. “Okay.”

---

Christy Hemmingway is a Calgary-based writer whose work spans from kidlit  about dragons that fit in your pocket to adult explorations of the resilience and fragility of human connection in the face of societal pressures, trauma, and change. She is drawn to stories that examine how people navigate the tension between external judgment and internal truth. When she isn’t writing Christy is teaching at a community college, learning from her kids, and keeping bees with her husband in their backyard.