The Sonder Review, Issue 9, Winter 2018

thin walls. You are alone with the remains of your lunch, your welts, your sweat, the spiders, the toilet. By the time your boyfriend returns with the Benadryl you’re lying in bed, naked and empty stomached. He pops a Benadryl into your mouth and rubs the cream on your welty back and you think to yourself how you do not deserve his kindness.

The Benadryl acts quickly, spreading throughout your system, zapping the reaction into submission, dehydrating you. Your boyfriend sits on the end of the bed and restrains you from scratching the red welts off of your skin. When you finally stop sweating, the ends of your hair have plastered themselves to the sides of your face. Your mascara has dripped down to your chin. After thirty minutes, you start to feel like yourself again. The welts have almost completely dried up and disappeared and your stomach has nothing left to protest. You and your boyfriend decide that this must have just been a freak accident; the cook probably didn’t grill the burger properly or maybe you just got a bad one.

Your roommate and boyfriend are both fine and you all had the same meal, so surely you just got stuck with a bad burger. You wonder if this is karmaPyou ate the , you are not appreciative of your boyfriend and you were late picking him up from the airport, so the Hindu gods have punished you with a rotten burger.

You imagine Shiva laughing to Vishnu, the two gods patting each other on the back and high fiving for a job well done.

Later that evening, you take your boyfriend to meet your new grad school friends and get drunk at a local dive bar. Even though the lights are dim, and the walls are dark, you can’t help but wonder about the bugs crawling beneath the padded seats of the bar stools. You find yourself touching the cracks in the cushioning, sticking your finger into the foam, feeling for heads, thoraxes, abdomens, wings and antennas, and legs and legs and legs. By your third beer, you stop checking.

Since your karmic punishment has been paid and your body is whole and healthy again, you drink yourself into another dimension where the streetlights sway and ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ and ‘Say You’ll Be There’ blare from a jukebox so you forget that you are living in 201 3 and at the end of the night when your boyfriend says goodbye to one of your male friends by whispering in his ear, you laugh it off, and scratch your arm predictively, as no itch is there.

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