Artichoke Heart
by Michael Czyzniejewski
At the salad bar, we talk about death. Lola and I prep and I let her go on. Lola’s back after two weeks out, another family tragedy: Her parents pulled the plug on her younger sister, Tina.
“The doctors say there was less than one percent chance of recovery,” Lola says. “I wonder what percentage would have changed their minds, kept her alive. Ten? Twenty?”
Tina was a cheerleader, the littlest on the squad, the one they tossed in the air. At the season tipoff game, two dipshits threw Tina as high as they could, but then, Thwapp! neck met hardwood. Tina never regained consciousness.
I tell Lola Tina was braindead the whole time, that it was merciful, her parents’ decision.
IMHO, they waited too long.
Lola asks what happened when she was gone, and I don’t have much to report. We opened, people bought food, same thing the next day. We were robbed last Thursday, a guy with a machete emptying the service desk register. Robberies happen so often, I don’t mention it.
“Are these red peppers?” Lola asks.
“Yep,” I say. ”They go next to the green ones. They replace artichoke hearts.”
“RIP, artichoke hearts.”
“RIP, Tina,” I say, and Lola pats my hand.
Tina is not the first sibling Lola has lost. Her older brother, Donovan, was killed in a car wash when she was eight. He worked inside, cleaning the machines, and one day someone didn’t see him and typed in their code. He got knocked around pretty badly, dragged down the conveyer. Normally, this wouldn’t kill a teenager, but Donovan had asthma and panicked, basically suffocating. Lola told me she barely remembers Donovan but says he always gave her his dessert.
“He was also neat and clean,” Lola said.
“He died how he lived,” I replied, and Lola nodded.
I don’t share stories of my infamous family deaths. I only have my father, who might not even be dead. One day, he didn’t come home from the auto plant, so Mom called the police. The investigation didn’t find him but told us he didn’t work at the auto plant and never had. Stranger, they didn’t know where he worked and how no one with his name was on record—he didn’t pay taxes and didn’t have a social security number. We knew Dad made money somewhere, went off each day in a suit with a briefcase. We had a house. He complained about his boss. I have his last name.
The cops looked into it for a while, but after a year, they stopped calling. Mom’s sure he’s dead. There’s never been a single lead.
“This wasn’t his decision,” Mom said eventually. Somehow it made us both feel better.
Donovan was the first of Lola’s siblings to die and Tina was the last. In between was Lola’s identical twin, Leila. Leila’s death was the weirdest, which is saying something. Every year, the circus came to town, and when the twins were twelve, a lion escaped. This was summer and it was hot and everyone slept with the windows open and … yeah. The lion would have probably gotten Lola, too, except her parents scared it off with Donovan’s old saxophone, the first thing her mom grabbed from the hall closet. It jumped out the window, taking Lelia with it.
The first time Lola told this story, I asked her if her mom used the sax as a club, or if she played it, tried to scare it that way.
“As a club,” Lola said.
I was disappointed. I’d pictured it the other way. I still kind of do.
What made Dad’s disappearance unique was what we found after. Eventually, we started to go through his stuff. Behind his office desk were massive bookshelves, stacked with binders that read AUTO PLANT on the spine, along with leatherbound volumes. When we tried to move the books, we discovered they were fake. Inside hollowed-out pages were little plastic cases, all filled with microcassettes, the kind a spy would use. We found a player in his desk drawer and played one marked from when I was five. Mom and I heard ourselves, a conversation at the dinner table, another in the living room while watching TV. We found tapes older than me, just him and Mom. Hundreds of cassettes, if not a thousand. We didn’t know what to think of any of it, why he had these—our entire lives recorded.
Where it gets bizarre: The next day, we went to work and school, and when we came home, all the books, all the tapes, and all the cases were gone. Poof! There wasn’t a mess like a robbery and nothing else was missing. Just the tapes. It scared the shit out of us so we stayed in a motel for a week. Then Mom put the house up for sale and we moved. That’s how we ended up here, me working at the Price Slasher, Lola becoming my best friend.
Lola works Register 3 and I work 4. I stare at her when she’s checking out. I picture her dying, how it’s going to be horrific. She’s not worried—she never talks destiny or curses. But I have a bad feeling. Maybe someone will machete her for her drawer. Maybe she’ll be decapitated on a carnival ride. I fear the Faces of Death shit coming her way. If I prayed, I’d pray for it to be painless. And for her parents. What’re their lives like?
I want to think Dad was the one who took the cassettes, was listening when we found them, came back to clean up his mess. Maybe he’s somewhere today, listening to me at a birthday party, Mom singing, asking what I wished for, me explaining why I couldn’t tell. He listens in his car like people listen to music. It’s what makes his drive go by faster, that familiar sound that’s always there, always waiting to be heard.
Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of four collections of stories, most recently The Amnesiac in the Maze (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023). He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Moon City Press and Moon City Review, as well as Interviews Editor of SmokeLong Quarterly.