"National Dish" by Thomas Mixon
"The guard walks into the repurposed travel plaza, hiking up his regulation-issued polka dot pants. Rations have been cut, so it’s not surprising that the outfit is too big for him."
We’re back! We took a short little “summer break,” where we paused publishing new stories but featured a lot of great stuff about some of the best stories of the last 25 years — lists of contributor favorites and interviews and essays. And a coincidence of timing, but it feels a kind of perfect pair with the last story published before the break, John Leary’s “Checkpoint.”
Every time I reread today’s story from Thomas Mixon, I pick up and/or focus in on something new, all while also feeling like I never fully “get” it. Which I mean as compliment; it is something true of most of my favorite stories. The world of the story feels so full, so fully realized, so unique to itself. It gets inside my brain and runs around in there, all while just eluding grasp. I love the way it gets my mind working, thinking about everything from George Saunders to Jordan Peele to the horrors of current events.
I hope this story gets its hooks in many of you the way it did with me. Enjoy, and thank you for reading!
—Aaron Burch
“National Dish”
The guard walks into the repurposed travel plaza, hiking up his regulation-issued polka dot pants. Rations have been cut, so it’s not surprising that the outfit is too big for him. What does surprise me, though, is his hesitation. Guards, on or off the job, are not known for their diplomacy. But then I remember, I’m also wearing regulation-issued polka dot pants. And mine are newer, less faded than his, usually a sign of higher rank.
He walks a few steps over to where I’m sitting, in the middle of the abandoned food court. No one’s here but me. The flashing sign, lit outside, must have gotten the better of him, despite the heavy orange traffic barrels I was too tired to move from the offramp. He stops in front of my table, looking down at my plate.
“Slim pickings,” he says, trying to feign an air of disgust, though I’m sure he’d devour the spongy red spheres, if I offered.
I do not offer.
I repeat, verbatim, the latest communique. Or, at least, the last one I heard. “The national dish must change, because we do not change. Everything in balance.”
The smallest hint of a sneer, on his lips. But he controls himself. He repeats it back to me, and sits when I gesture to the chair opposite myself.
While I slowly pick at the national dish with a fork, he studies my face, and asks, “Where you coming from?”
No point in lying to him. “Hardfall,” I say, using the unofficial term for the Hartford, Vermont Detention Center, built one hundred and sixty five feet above, and just on the edge of, Quechee Gorge. It’s not a clever name, but when you spend your day pushing detainees off a cliff, one’s brain isn’t at its sharpest.
He’s still looking at my face. I grip the fork. It would be better if we fought to the death out back, but if it has to be here, then fine. He’s got size on me, and strength, and is obviously familiar with this section of the repurposed travel plaza, tapping his heels on the ground until he finds a specific loose tile.
Bending down to retrieve whatever he’s hidden on some previous visit, his eyes don’t leave mine. Which makes me nervous. Which makes me almost run to the back without warning, and ruin everything, when he says, “Shit, they’re having us wear the masks again?”
I run my hands over my cheeks. The remnants of lines. He’s still holding his unidentifiable contraband. If I want to do this right, I need to put him at ease.
“Never made sense to me,” I say.
He opens his palm. It’s a fake banana. He bites off a piece, the sound of rubber squeaking in the chasms between rotting teeth. “It makes perfect sense, I just hate looking like a fucking idiot.”
He chews fake bananas the way my father did, every time his sitcom got another shipment of props, resigned enough to demonstrate allegiance, but not at all satisfied by the taste.
I cut into my meal. The guard visibly relaxes. No one likes to eat alone, I guess. He leans back a bit in his chair, blowing a raspberry fart toward the ceiling.
He says, “When I first started, it was us, wearing the masks. I don’t have a family or anything, but the other guys, they didn’t want the detainees to be able to identify them, do something to their wives or kids. Fine, I didn’t complain. But I could see the other guys working it out in their heads, like me. Why should we care if they recognize us? If we care, that implies we think that there’s a chance one or more of the detainees will escape. Which just doesn’t happen. It’s funny, none of us say a word, but there’s an understanding. And one day, badoom, we get the order: no masks for us anymore, just for the detainees. So of course we’re overjoyed. The guards, I mean. The detainees, who the fuck cares. We take our masks off, put them on the detainees, done. And everything’s fine for a few weeks. But then, I mean it was hard to tell for sure, but it looked like the detainees were smiling. Like they had power, or they were happy, or both. Something about them wearing the masks, and not us — there was an imbalance. Again, none of us said anything, but pretty soon, badoom, another order: everyone needs to cover their face. So there’s an illusion, you could say, of equality. Which is kind of fun, you know? Because of course there isn’t equality, which works to our favor. The guards, I mean. I don’t know, sometimes I wonder if pushing people off a cliff all day is doing something to my brain. All our brains, the guards. Maybe the detainees too, the ones who are spared for no particular reason on any given day, from falling to their death. But who the fuck cares about them. Of course, it’s a cycle. I just don’t know what triggers it. Because sure enough, after a while we start wanting the masks again. We either have families, or know someone with a family, or remember a family, or saw one on TV. Like...”
Trailing off, he stares at my face again. Does he recognize me? If so, from the sitcom, or somewhere more recent?
I pick up one of the red foam circles, perfectly sliced in half, the way my dad taught me. Because they only made clown noses in one size, and I had a small face, even as a teenager.
The guard doesn’t take it right away, but smiles. “It was you, wasn’t it? You wanted the masks back.”
It wasn’t me, but I don’t correct him. I don’t do anything except will him to take what is definitely not a tomato out of my hands, and imagine pushing him, and every other guard I’ve ever seen, into Quechee Gorge, again, and again.
A decade before, a boy stood with his father next to one of the many cameras of Studio 1. It used to be Studio 9, but by that point there was only one actual studio left, so the government renamed it. The assistant floor manager was putting the finishing touches on the set, for what would be the last episode ever of Sad SAHD. Only a few people, including the father, but not including the boy, knew it would be the last episode ever.
The set stayed mostly consistent from one episode to the next, the living room of a famous clown, forced to be a stay at home dad because his idiot son, without fail, would get sent home from circus school. Every show would start with the father excited to get back into the world. He’d be getting ready, putting on his spinny bowtie, adjusting his water-spraying flower lapel, just about to walk out the front door, when the boy would mope in, depressed as fuck.
Which wasn’t hard for the boy to pull off, since in real life he was indeed depressed as fuck. He was fifteen, but everyone still thought of him as a boy, since he started doing the show at age eight. Seven years, nearly half his life, pretending to be bad at being a clown, when really he could juggle better than his dad.
His dad, before that last episode ever, gave no sign of what he had planned. He was trying to fit the red foam nose over the boy’s face, reminding him to eat before they went live.
“I hate bananas,” said the boy.
The father reached into the crate he was sitting on the side of, the top layer of which was lined with squeaky prank chickens. “You need your strength.” He handed the boy real chicken, hidden underneath.
But the boy was depressed as fuck. And felt guilty. He knew there were people in the nation starving, that the nation was out starting and fighting wars and that people were dying. And he knew he was lucky, that he was able to eat because of what was smuggled into Studio 1.
What he didn’t know was how unnecessary most of the production was. When his father started the show, they did it with a cast and crew of six. By the morning of what would be the last episode ever, they were up to sixty. Sixty people his father helped feed, helped keep safe. The government approved it all. It was the most popular show. It had become, since the guards pulled the plug on all the other studios, their show, the only show.
The thing about a government without ideals, whose only function is to detain people and push them off cliffs so that no one can confront them and push them off cliffs instead, is that they used the content of his father’s show to fit their message. The message was malleable, was always something about transforming, or getting back to something, but simultaneously remaining steadfast, staying the same. It didn’t matter what his father insinuated or satirized — with the script, with the lighting, with the wardrobe — the nation needed something, however stupid and intangible, to digest. And digest they did, every Monday through Sunday evening.
“Where’s Mom?” the boy asked. She was in charge of the costumes. His rainbow wig itched. He was fifteen, but still wanted her to fix it, to rub his back.
When his father told him his mother had the night off, he was annoyed, but not suspicious. Sometimes she took a night off. What he didn’t know was that she couldn’t even sew, was colorblind, hid stowaway letters and messages underneath her dirty polka dot pants, flecked with so much paint and safety pins the inspectors would waive her through the entrance to the lot, without much trouble.
They all slept next to the lot, the cast and crew. A makeshift immobile caravan of old trailers and porta porties. The boy had friends. The boy had food. He knew he was lucky, and that was exactly the problem.
“How do you sleep at night, man,” he said to his father. “Helping them, like propaganda.”
The assistant floor manager nearly dropped the scroll he was securing to the banister of a stairway that ostensibly led to an upstairs, but really led to nothing. The father gave the assistant floor manager a signal, a classic easy-does-it gesture, everything is fine.
Ignoring the accusation, the father implored the boy one more time to eat, then left to get into position. The boy sighed. He reached into a different crate, full of artificial fruit, and plucked out a real banana. He ate it quickly, both to forget about how he had sustenance and many didn’t, and also because he couldn’t be late.
The show was always filmed live, a test of loyalty.
What would be the last episode ever started off like normal. The boy was on the other side of the front door, waiting for his cue. He couldn’t see his father, in the living room, but he could see around the corners of the set. The crew seemed on edge. There seemed to be only half of them. He could hear his father clapping his hands, pretending to be excited about going out into a fictional world where people didn’t push other people off cliffs.
The line the boy was waiting for was, “And to think, this whole time I could have worn sandals!” Something about his father looking at his feet, under the giant clown shoes, for the first time, him thinking they were the same size of his giant clown shoes, then realizing they weren’t. But on the word “think,” someone scooped him up from behind.
“What the fuck are you —” but he was cut off. There was a burlap sack over his body. Was he being kidnapped? No, there was the voice of the assistant floor manager, calming saying, “Quiet, your mother’s waiting.” How the hell had that assistant floor manger gotten so strong. What the hell was happening on set — the sound of scrolls unfolding. His father breaking from his stage voice. Speaking plainly, sincerely.
What the boy heard before he was out of hearing range, before he was in the trunk of a car, with his mother: the sounds of explosions, what he learned later was the government bombing Studio 1, was his father asking everyone watching to fight back. Was telling them how to find the hidden caches of food and weapons. Was telling them, not with his words, but in the way he stood there while the air sirens went off, that this would be his last performance.
And the boy, finally breaking from his own version of stage voice, his own sulkiness - smiling in the trunk of some car. Laughing because the people who were dropping the bombs were also warning about the bombs, but not warning the people who the bombs were being dropped on. Rather, warning everyone at home, about what was going to happen to even the most beloved sitcom, the only sitcom left, and how after that there’d be nothing for anyone to watch at night, and how now maybe there’d be no more pretense, no more cutesie hey we’re a totally normal nation huddled around the warm glow of a simulated togetherness. How from then on there’d be no sugarcoating the lack of everything with a half hour of gags.
The boy threw up. His mother rubbed his back.
“What the fuck is this?” the guard asks. He inspects what I’ve handed him. He may be wearing polka dot pants, but he’s not in a good mood. He either recognizes what he was hoping to eat as a clown nose, and refuses to believe it, or is so braindead from pushing detainees off cliffs all day that he always thinks he’s being tricked, and just doesn’t know how.
I shrug. “There’s a whole bunch of them out back.” Which isn’t a lie. Which gets the better of his curiosity. He follows me.
The amount of extra noses we ordered and were granted without question, for the TV show, shouldn’t have been possible. But I found out later that the government, unable to provide anything important for its citizens, were more than happy to mass produce crate after crate of them. Sometimes the leaders wore them for victory speeches. Sometimes for funerals.
Once we make it to the former kitchen, I say, “There never was an uprising.”
“A what now?” But I stab him in the throat.
After dragging his lifeless body down the offramp, and ungracefully slumping it into the trunk of his own car, I feel stronger than I know I am. Must be the adrenaline. I feel like I could drive to the Hartford Detention Center, barrel through security, head straight to the gorge, and jump out right before the car plummets the one hundred and sixty five feet to the uncaring earth below.
Instead, I drive to the mini golf course.
I park a mile away from perimeter of the lookout, and give the signal.
Whoever is on duty is being extra cautious, which makes sense. I whistle low, to the theme of Sad SAHD, and pass three more backup protocols before I see someone emerge from the place I’ve called home for nearly ten years.
When I see who it is, I nod casually, like I haven’t been missing for two weeks. “Hi Dad.”
Of course, it’s not my father. It’s R, the assistant floor manager. He kept bothering me so often after the bombing of Studio 1, asking me how I was doing, if I was OK, if I needed to talk, that I did the classic teenager thing and yelled at him, saying he wasn’t my father, which seemed to hurt him. So then I did what my dad would have done, and made a joke out of it.
He takes me in his arms and his touch is something between an embrace and a strangle.
“Don’t you ever scare...” but he can’t finish. I don’t like how he’s crying, because I don’t want to start crying too, so I start explaining what happened. Which works, because he listens.
I tell him how I couldn’t go another fucking day hiding beneath a mini golf course. I tell him how I harassed the guards outside the Detention Center for a few nights, throwing rocks, lighting fires, until they found me. I tell him how many guards I saw working inside, what they were wearing, any first names I heard carelessly tossed around. I tell him how they took me out to the cliff sooner than I expected, and how I tried to escape, and how impossible that was. How I only got lucky, landing on the body of some other detainee, long dead, halfway down the gorge, tangled up in some kind of bush or nest bunched along a seventy instead of ninety degree angle. How I tossed my shoes down in the darkness and didn’t think I had a chance. How I used my clothes, and whatever was left of the other detainee’s clothes and tied a rope, and slid my way as best I could just before dawn. I tell him about the repurposed travel plaza, finding the spare outfit, the kitchen knife, turning on the flashing sign come nightfall, luring the guard, killing him.
He stops me there. “Did you know him?”
“No. He just happened to come in.”
“But you saw him at the Detention Center?”
I re-explain everything again. But he can’t get past the fact that, despite the guy definitely being a guard, definitely being a bad guy, pushing people off cliffs all day, I hadn’t actually seen him push anyone. That he wasn’t one of the assholes whose faces I memorized before they got the mask on me.
“I know you’re hurting,” he says. The idiot is going to make me cry. “But your mother wouldn’t have wanted this for you.”
“She should have thought of that before getting reckless.” By which I mean her last raid, six months ago. And then, “Shit, I forgot to mention, I got us a car.”
But he doesn’t seem to register this good news. He’s gotten complacent. Maybe he likes living in the drainage areas beneath the mini golf course. He volunteers for watch duty. He takes care of everyone, the thirty-three of us left from Studio 1. But he’s not what we need for an uprising.
As if he’s reading my mind, he says, “I know, I’m old. I met your dad when I was twenty, and I was old then too. I tried to stop him, you know.”
I didn’t know. I don’t know. I’ve gotten us some very valuable intel, and he wants to make me cry. He wants to question my stabbing of someone who very much deserved it.
“I’m leaving,” I say, but I don’t move. He doesn’t either. We sit next to each other, and watch the sunrise. “You were always so good at dressing up sets, but this place looks like shit.”
I’ve rarely been above the synthetic turf during the day. I expect him to tell me how he’s carefully manicured the mini golf course to look like shit, to divert attention or interest. I expect him to tell me how hard that is for him. But he doesn’t say anything. I expect him to get up, lift one of the many trap doors, descend like a coward. Only he doesn’t. Even when a car passes. Even when two cars pass. Even when I can barely fight it, and the tears trickle like clueless rivulets at the bottom of a gorge, across my face. Even when I mutter to myself, that I can’t go back, he doesn’t ask whether I mean my mother’s unmarked grave, or beneath Hole 4, where I assume my mattress still is, or the Detention Center. And I swear, in the distance, I can hear the sound of someone screaming, like they are being pushed off a cliff, and when I tell him so, I expect a certain tone in his response, worry mixed with sympathy mixed with disapproval mixed with, why not, love. Only he doesn’t do that. He doesn’t tell me it’s in my head, that we’re too far away from Hartford. He says, “I hear it too.”
STORY:
Thomas Mixon has poems and stories in or forthcoming from Pithead Chapel, Bridge Eight, Rattle, and elsewhere. He's trying to write a few books.
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ART:
Nikita Andester is an author and multimedia artist living in Toulouse, France. She runs Snail Mail Sweethearts, a Substack about history's juiciest correspondence featuring monthly microfiction and original artwork.
Next Tuesday, we’ll feature a bonus interview with Thomas about this story, and perhaps have a little more bonus material as well.