Fiction
Schrödinger’s Ham
Jackson had arrived at the time in a boy’s life when the eating begins. The real eating.
My brother Jackson was fourteen years old, and hungry.
“Dad, where’s the ham?” he asked, at three-fifteen in the afternoon on the first day of school. He’d been home for five minutes.
“In the fridge.” My dad didn’t look up from his book.
“I can’t find it.”
“If you don’t see any, then don’t you think it’s reasonable to conclude that we’re out?”
“I don’t think we are,” said my brother.
Dad just shrugged.
Jack huffed back to the kitchen.
That’s how it started: that same conversation, with minor variations and embellishments, repeated, every other day. Jackson had arrived at the time in a boy’s life when the eating begins. The real eating. I mean, honestly, I don’t understand how parents can manage to keep food in the house with teenage boys around. As for me, I was…
