by Ilana Stanger-Ross

I entered the kitchen and found my father standing over the garbage can, grimacing, eating cheese.

“Your mother buys too much cheese,” he said, his voice dry with the salt of it, “and then you, with your crazy diets, don’t eat it and it goes bad and I have to eat it all.”

“Dad,” I said, with the easy smile of my privileged generation, “That cheese cost what, seven dollars? Less even. The money’s gone whether it gets eaten or not, so you might as well just throw it away.”

My father nodded as I spoke, leaving the cheese temporarily unmolested. “Yes,” he said, “This is true. You’re right, I don’t need to eat this cheese.” And with that he tossed the cheese, saran wrap and all, into the garbage.

I thought, Wow, look at that, I cured my father of the Great Depression.

We each ate a carrot in celebration.

But it didn’t last. My father went back to his old ways, eating his cheese from between the mold. Once I even found him biting into a kitchen magnet. It was made to look like a cookie, and glazed, and it had slid from the refrigerator onto the floor, where my father saw it lying, just being wasted.

The dentist fixed his chipped tooth, said, “Well, these things happen.”

I never gave my speech again, understood the futility. I knew my voice was clear and my father recognized its truth, but his mother’s voice was louder in his ear, whispering, “Ess, ess mein kind, die kinder geyen aus fun hunger in Europe.” Eat, eat my child, for in Europe the children are dying of hunger.

There are forty years between my father and me; there is so much we cannot explain to each other as we stand at separate ends of my mother’s kitchen, eating.

In the Kitchen by Ilana Stanger-Ross won the 2003 Flash in the Attic flash fiction contest and appeared in Issue 6 of Fiction Attic: The Journal of Elegant Wit. View current flash fiction contest guidelines here.

Ilana Stanger-Ross earned a Masters in Fiction from Temple University. Her critically acclaimed novel, Sima’s Undergarments for Women, was published in 2008. She is the recipient of a Leeway Foundation grant for emerging artists, as well as a residency grant from the Ragdale Foundation. Her stories have appeared in Lilith Magazine, Red Rock Review, killingthebuddha.com, and The Bellevue Review. She lives in Toronto.