A Short Story by Stephen Wall

Warren Fitzsimmons waddled his bulky frame over to the dinner table, and sat down across from his parents.  He was using his fingertips to support the edges of his Swanson Classic TV Dinner tray, which was nuclear-hot everywhere else.  The steam was fogging up his glasses and forming water droplets on his prematurely balding pate.  He wiped the excess moisture on a stained black t-shirt with white lettering that said, “DO YOU EVEN </code>, BRO?”

He unwrapped the perforated clear film, balled it up, and set it on his mother’s good linen tablecloth where it slowly started to expand and resume its former shape with a high-pitched polyolefin groan.  He looked across the table at his mother and father, who had been softly chattering about something inane when they heard him walk into the room.  The conversation had stopped then and Warren became their focus as he started to eat.

His father was reserved and quiet; maybe a little judgemental as he avoided eye contact and stared at his plate.  He was wearing his gray suit coat, a white shirt, and a burgundy and yellow striped tie; practically the same thing he wore every day he went to the office.  Warren had spent the bulk of his childhood seeing his father as a man who was either going-to or coming home from “the office.” Warren was twenty five years old and still not quite sure what his father’s “office” did or how the man who was the template for half his genetic materia filled his time when he was away from home.    

His mother was wearing another in her endless collection of sleeveless floral print dresses.  She’d picked up the habit of wearing these loose-fitting garments after she switched to an insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor to try to control her diabetes.  The dresses made wearing the little belt pack and thin plastic tubes that wound their way across her body a bit more comfortable.  To Warren, the dresses, tubes, and little monitor swatches were just aesthetic features of “Mom.”  It had never crossed his mind to think how they made her feel.  “Mom” wasn’t a person like him.  She was a force of nature you didn’t question that kept the world turning, like gravity or the jet stream.  She was just perpetual, eternal “Mom.”

Her hair was frizzy the way it always was when she had just finished cooking in the small family kitchen with its overlapping layers of heat from steam, oven burners, and the window that faced the setting summer sun.  There was something about when her hair got like this that put Warren in mind of the best days of his childhood.  She always complained about it, but Warren loved that little imperfect detail about her appearance.  It was hair that spoke of hundreds of nights of  macaroni and cheese, chicken fingers, and pizza pockets; the food she made for him because he’d never eat the casseroles and salads she made for the “grown-ups” in the house, even when he’d finished highschool. 

“How was your day dear?” his mother started the usual dinner conversation  

Warren thought for a half-a-minute and stammered between bites of molton cherry cobbler, “Fuck, I don’t know.  Um, I mean, it was okay.” He took a gulp from his can of Mountain Dew to cool the burns on the roof his mouth,  “I did a little admin work and then Turds03 and JohnnyBigD1KKK came online and we were trolling these degenerates who had their fag-marriage licenses revoked.”  Warren was sheepish for a moment, worried he’d said too much and his parents would take offense or start asking probing questions.  He felt like a kid again, but in that way that hurt his stomach and caused his bowels to rumble.

But Mom had recently learned to let most of the stuff she used to complain about go.  “That’s nice dear,” she said. “How’s Turds03 doing?  Did he get that job he was interviewing for?”

Warren shrugged, a little more at ease knowing the pushback wouldn’t come.  “Nah, he said they would probably pick some soy beta faggot for it because it involved ‘customer facing’ projects.”. He laughed to himself. Neither of his parents registered it.  

“Oh that’s too bad for Turds03,” his mother replied with a degree of pity that immediately swung toward something positive, “Hopefully he’ll find something soon.”  Mom was always good at thinking positively. It was one of her most enduring personality traits. 

“Did you watch the president’s speech about the drone strike at the border yesterday, son?” His father finally spoke up with a grunt that ended on a high pitched warble or cough that sounded like a digital glitch or maybe some food caught in his throat.     

Warren looked at his father, the gray haired man whose face looked a lot like his but with thirty years of stress and agitation added on. The older man lowered his eyes down to his plate.  It was a submissive gesture coupled with a sense he was bracing for what was to come.  Dad was always a bit of libtard, but “Good times make weak men,” and so on.  Warren took the opportunity to twist the knife a bit.  “Yeah, me and Turds03 memed the hell out of the part where he told that Mexican reporter he was going to send his relatives home to him in garbage bags.” Warren let his chuckles roll out between bites of corn.  “The fucking soy libs lost their shit!  It was so fucking funny!”

There was an awkward silence from both his parents as if they were doing quiet calculations of what words should follow their son’s admission of his favorite pastime.

“Yeah, pretty funny, son.” said Warren’s father, not looking at him but seeming to stare into the middle distance of the dining room table.  His dad had learned that questioning Warren would lead to an argument his son would insist on winning.  Warren would just double and triple down until his dad’s libtard brain got the message that he was in charge now and you didn’t win arguments at the dinner table anymore with things like “values” or “evidence.”  Warren could win now just by shouting his father down and his father was very aware of that. 

Warren stirred his mashed potatoes. They were crusty at the edges and just a little cold in the middle.  The potatoes in this brand of tv dinner never heated correctly, but the blue box with its yellow lettering always reminded Warren of simpler times, when he’d come home from school and play video games for hours in his room before his mother would give up and just bring him dinner on a plastic serving tray.  These days though, Warren was trying to eat at the dinner table more often to establish a more grown-up routine.  

His father had been less forgiving when he was in high school.  That was decades ago now, but Warren always felt like it was yesterday.  He was always prodding Warren for things like not getting better grades, not talking to girls, and not trying out for the mathletes or the debate club.  Warren was good at math and liked to argue his opinions, afterall. He just never had the patience for people and he hated most kids his own age when he was in highschool. He was a self-taught programmer and his online certifications had let him settle into doing tech support from home where he could spend most of his days with one eye on work and one eye on 4chan. 

Warren finished the last bite of his fried chicken drumstick with its nostalgic, mushy breading.  There was a streak of cooked blood staining the bone just behind the little rubbery tendon he’d always avoided eating since he was a child.  The red streak brought a thought to Warren’s mind he pushed away. He suddenly felt less hungry.  It was time to end this.  Time to engage with something that would absorb his attention entirely for a while.  

“Goodnight Mom. Goodnight Dad,” Warren said with a brief smile that was not focused on his parents, but focused inward on his childhood memories he used to bury other ideas: PS2 games, Transformers toys, and TV dinners.  Why grow up at all?  

“That’s it Warren,” he told himself, “Just focus.  Don’t think about it.  Everything’s normal. Everything’s as it should be.  You spent time with them and you said ‘goodnight,’ so just walk out of the room.  You don’t need to explain.  You don’t need to say you’re sorry.”

Warren’s mom and dad smiled as their son switched off the monitors supporting their AI video feeds. The warm, smiling images approximating his parents’ faces and behaviors culled and generated from scanned photos and cellphone videos winked out of existence. Warren wanted to watch pornography now on the surround sound TV in the living room and, despite the fact his parents were just generated by a Language Learning Model these days, he wasn’t going to leave them on while he edged himself and gooned out to his favorite cuck porn.  

There was a musty basement in the Fitzsimmons’  home directly beneath where Warren now sat on the living room couch tugging at the drawstring of his sweatpants.  Warren’s mother and father lay side-by-side, wrapped in a pair of matching royal-blue plastic tarps sealed with multiple long strands of tightly wound, crisscrossing duct tape.  Odd lumps were starting to form where bloat and decay were trapped beneath the layers of factory-woven polyethylene fabric.  They were starting to attract flies.