Creeping Vine by Andy Bodinger
The video of me and the wife baking Fine French Cuisine Pizza Pie coaxed out more than ten million views. We make a modest living being hate-watched on the internet. Our channel is called Rise and our fans make their disgust known in the comments. They call us slobs, pussies, and cultural terrorists. They loathe our homemade pizzas: vegan Chinese takeout, yum-yum salmon hibachi, paneer-n-dal, and our first death threat surfaced after we squeezed guava over a nest of rocket. The morons think we actually take more than a bite out of any of it. But the morons watch the ads that generate the revenue that pays our bills. A year ago, we got T-boned by some bum scoring his DUI three-peat, and now we’re too flinchy to leave the house. Our every ingredient arrives by mail or rideshare. The sedan her dad helped us buy sits in the driveway. It still smells new every month when I take it for a white-knuckle cruise around the block. I took the drive while the French pizza baked in the oven—pre-roasted asparagus, sage, and shimmering duck fat—and though she tried to hide it, I could tell she was rattled. I was back in no time and the house smelled like a piss-soaked exorcism. In my brief absence, she prematurely pulled out our creation, and sliced it into bite-sized ribbons. “For dunking,” she offered. She motioned to the divots of ranch and honey mustard and Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ. This last one is a joke between us, because I tell her all the time, she’s my sweet baby raison d’être. The day we got hit, I can’t remember who was driving, which side we were struck from. But I do remember that she clenched her eyes closed for hours. She was fully conscious, but refused to look at the doctors or to see me and my damage. She asked me where I was. I was right there, right next to her. Call me a liar, but in my addled brain, in my prayers, I said it this way; please God, help her rise again. A few weeks after our creation burned through French social media, someone managed to, in a Russian nesting doll of packaging, slip their dog’s ashes into the mail with a note that said, for dipping. We were unphased. Anything in our house is our domain. We sprinkled the ashes over our tomato garden, like it was Christmas in California. By the afternoon the whole neighborhood was out at work. We sat in our backyard, and she brought out Persian cucumbers and a selection of hummuses. Each bite was a whole other meal. I like to think we’re living a thousand lifetimes in this house of ours. The only sound for miles was chunks of cucumber snapping in twain and twain again.
Andy Bodinger is a fiction writer, essayist, and PhD candidate at Ohio University. He earned his MFA from Oklahoma State University where he was an associate editor at The Cimarron Review. He is formerly an ESL teacher, having worked in The Czech Republic and China. His essays and stories have appeared in Willow Springs, South Dakota Review, and The Pinch, among other places.
