Two Tacos, by Aaron Burch

I’d eaten an edible an hour or so before, then another between then & now. The plan was to time it such that I was biting into that first taco right when it would most taste like the best thing ever.

Listen to Aaron Burch read “Two Tacos”:

                                                                                                                            after Denis Johnson

I ate the first taco right there at the drive thru window.

“What size drink?” a voice asked.

Staring at the half-eaten Doritos® Locos shell filled with seasoned beef and lettuce and cheese in my hand, I wondered if it was asking, or was it the other half, the half still in my mouth, the half currently in the middle of being chewed. It was hard to tell.

“What size drink?” again. I looked to my left and the drive thru employee who had handed me my bag of salvation was staring at me. I could see in her eyes and her face and her posture and the shimmering waves of her aura vibrating the air around her, that she hated me. I didn’t blame her.

“Large,” I said, knowing I’d told her, multiple times, but knowing too that only an asshole would point that out.

“Are you sure?” she asked. She was a blackhole dangerously close to swallowing my very existence into the void. “You kept saying ‘medium’.”

I remembered just a moment before, or maybe longer, a time when we were still babies, before she hated me to her core, telling her “medium, medium, medium,” over and over like a chirping bird when she’d asked if I’d wanted any sauce packets. And then I remembered they didn’t have Medium. I’d meant Mild. I was the asshole after all.

“Sorry,” I told her. “Yes, I’m sure. Large. Thank you, thank you, thankyou,” I kept saying I don’t know how many times.

I’d eaten an edible an hour or so before, and then another between then and now. The plan was to time it such that I was biting into that first taco right when it would most taste like the best thing I’d ever tasted. My timing, it turned out, was perfect. It was my measuring, the quantity and milligrams and my own tolerance, I’d gotten all wrong. Or maybe those were perfect, too. Let me tell you what all happened next and then you can be the judge.

She handed me my drink and I put my car into drive and drove off into the future. I didn’t dare check my rearview mirror for the chaos that might be happening behind me. I drove through one green light and then another and another and my brain glowed with the idea of the possibilities of never hitting a red light again, the city and all of life telling me to keep going, no need to ever slow down or stop again. Distracted and euphoric by the idea of the world being mine for the taking, I was already downtown before I’d had any ideas for what to even take. I’d driven right past the turn for my apartment, and then right past the other turn into where I used to live and had a few times absentmindedly turned onto, pure muscle memory of a previous life, previous turns, previous muscles.

I parked on the street outside my office and finished the taco I’d started to eat in the drive thru, the first taco, while listening to the radio play me nostalgic songs of my youth that made me feel simultaneously like a teenager again and as ancient as a redwood.

A couple years earlier, I’d gone on a second or fourth date with a woman. We’d met downtown for drinks, and then gone to a movie together across town in her car. Only time I’d ever been in a BMW. I’d felt like some kind of CEO in that leather passenger cockpit. I wanted her to drive us around forever while I held onto that feeling and idea of myself, and then I wanted to never feel like that again. I struck executive off my mental list of things I might one day want to be. I still hadn’t figured out what kind of person I wanted to be, was moving through life as a process of elimination.

After the movie, she drove us back downtown for me to get my car, parked right in that exact spot where I’d just finished my taco, more or less. I looked around, tried to remember. Maybe neither more nor less, maybe exactly right there. Maybe some muscle memory had reared its influence after all. I’d asked her if she wanted to come back to my place. Instead of answering, she had this smile and this look in her eyes and reached across me and pushed a button and then my seat was all the way back and while she unbuckled my belt, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d asked her back to my place, wondering what I would have done if she’d said yes. I was, I later liked to describe that short moment in my life, between places.

I rummaged through my oversized technicolor fast food bag, pulled out a mystery item, got excited when I unwrapped a Chalupa Supreme®. A perfect gift! Each bite had an even more perfect mouthfeel than the last. Life was infinite with pleasure, if you let it be.

This was how I liked to do it. Order two tacos and then whatever other menu items glowed off the drive thru screen at that very moment of ordering. Enough for two people, three, a whole carful. That was the trick, to order more than you think you should, more than even your hungriest self might think it wanted, more than you’d ever in your right or wrong mind think you could eat. And I always started with a taco. Ended with the other. Like the meal itself was a taco, the two tacos like the shell wrapped around the meat of whatever items some other version of myself had deemed to order. Cheesy? Sure. Whatever. Let the quesadilla who is without cheese cast the first Diablo packet.

I turned off my car, grabbed the family-size bag from where it was riding shotgun, took it all to the grass outside my place of employment. I thought about the joys of this city, of my life, my friends, even my job and my office—three floors up into the sky from where I sat, cross-legged in the middle of the lawn—where I’d slept in a sleeping bag on the floor for a few nights when my ex and I first separated before moving into a hotel for a few nights and then an apartment I subletted while whoever lived there in the normal world, and maybe even still did in another version of this one, traveled the world or lived somewhere else or whatever had taken them away from their normal place of life and sleep and then an apartment of my own when I found one and started to live más.

I ate two Cinnabon Delights® and thought about how that cinnamon sugar on your tongue and then the give of that bite into the donut hole followed by the sensation of Cinnabon’s signature cream cheese frosting popped balloon bursting into your mouth should be used in marketing for Taco Bell. Or edibles. Maybe both. An incredible missed opportunity for cross-marketing.

Laying back, I looked up into the sky. I could feel every blade of grass tickling every hair on my body. Every star in the sky was right at that moment racing through the atmosphere, ricocheting off the nougat and caramel and chocolate layers of the Milky Way, pinballing through the galaxy looking for extra lives if they could just collect enough points, and here I was, more still than I’d ever been. All those stars, every single one of them, would one day burn out and die. So would I. So will you. But not today.

I opened another present and revealed a Chicken Chipotle Melt! The speed of life was passing me by and I’d never before in all my lives tasted anything so perfect. I ate it all in three bites, or maybe only two. I couldn’t eat it fast enough. Some part of it, or maybe all of it, lodged itself in my throat, so I grabbed my large Baja Blast® and sucked that nectar of Zeus and Ares and probably all those other Gods, too, but I wasn’t sure about them, washing it all down, and I reached into the bag again and grabbed another Chicken Chipotle Melt, now knowing from the size of it in my hands exactly what it would be, and ate that even faster than its twin.

I couldn’t swallow. The Baja Blast® had failed its one job to wash it all down. It was all stuck inside me, dammed up, nowhere to go. I tried again to swallow but couldn’t. Tried to cough it up, but that didn’t work either.

I looked around for someone to save me, but found no one. I was the last man on Earth. Was this the end? My destiny? It felt apt. Where was everyone? I had wished them all away for this beautiful but now fatal moment of solitude. I never should have been given such power. Everyone who had ever known me knew that much to be true. Maybe it was my today after all. Goodbye, stars. Be beautiful and otherworldly until it is one day your time to eat too fast and choke and die and burn your way shooting across the sky.

I tried to self-Heimlich, and nothing happened. I tried to throw up, and nothing happened. I tried to pray to God or Zeus or the inventor of the Cinnabon Delight®, and nothing happened.

My two options were to not do anything and die or to text someone for help then inevitably not need it and to then have to live with that embarrassment for the rest of my life. I couldn’t decide. Another trolly dilemma.

And then, weighed down by the question and thus unburdened by trying to actively do anything to save myself, I threw up. Just like that, I could swallow again freely. Blessed with another life after all.

In the morning, I’d wake up the same as every other day. Make my coffee, scramble some eggs, go to work, stare at the clock in the corner of my computer counting the minutes until I got to go home and be bored there instead of getting paid to be bored somewhere else. I wouldn’t tell anyone the story of dying and being born again. No one wants to hear stories about other people’s weddings or dreams or resurrections unless they were involved themselves.

In another life, in another time, in another universe, maybe I’d wake up and quit my job, or be celebrated for the miracle I’d experienced, or become a Taco Bell spokesperson, or maybe I’d go about my life mostly as normal except with a new, more optimistic outlook on life, but here in this one, that was still a day away, and I was still just laying on that grass, looking up into the sky. I would have more nights like this to follow—get high, go to Taco Bell, order an embarrassing-to-confess amount of food, marvel at how easy it was to spend a ridiculous percentage of a paycheck on tacos and burritos and quesadillas and rolls and wraps and folds and pullovers and balls and spirals and tornadoes all filled with barely different combinations of meat and cheese and sauce—but none of them again would ever be quite as perfect and filled with possibility as this one. I’d come back from the dead! The world had opened itself up and showed me a grace and beauty I wouldn’t be able to convey to you even if I tried.

Aaron Burch is the author of Year of the Buffalo, Stephen King’s The Body, and Backswing. He was the Founding Editor of Hobart, and is the co-editor of HAD, and is excited and curious for how this attempt at publishing longer short stories will go.

All art also by Aaron.

This story is a little shorter than what he’s looking for for this site/project, and he never intended to self-publish, but he likes it, thinks it’s fun, and he launched both Hobart and HAD with stories of his own, so figured why not keep that streak going? What else do you do with your obviously (?) rejected Taco Bell Quarterly stories?

---

The current goal is to publish short stories in the 3k-8k word range every other week, pairing stories with original art and paying contributors $100. Subscribing will fund those payments, which are currently out of Aaron’s pockets.

Submissions will open in a month or two, after first featuring a handful of solicited stories to help set the tone for what I am looking for.

Until then, every Tuesday for the next few weeks (and then probably every other Tuesday thereafter), I’ve got short stories coming from Ben Loory, Jac Jemc, Dave Housley, and more…

---