Mikki Aronoff
Why We Can’t Lose Weight
Before there was arguing there was peace, and before there was peace there was war, and after the Second World War there were feelings, some specific, some vague, all floating around the heads of those who had them, like cartoon balloons with words inside, and my parents argued back and forth, back and forth, usually over pot roast and potatoes, that that’s not the way it should be, that floating is not what feelings should do— they should stick to bodies or more accurately reside inside them, bumping against organs and bones, and it should be a fineable offence for bodies to let go of them and let them be seen, or, worse, heard, and I wondered weren’t those feelings, but of course I kept quiet.
Today we extrapolate about such things, because that’s fun to do, and we explain, without saying how, because reason doesn’t count, that’s why we can’t lose weight, and we say this about everything, leaning back on our recliners with our calorie-controlled frozen dinners and dim the lights and wish for simpler times, when our grandparents maintained, simply, that balloons are simply for floating and really not much else, and when one is tired of holding on to them, one can simply let go, along with all those newfangled, fanciful ideas, but they did understand (since balloons seemed to be everyone’s favorite topic) how it was reasonable to be drawn to the Hindenburg, like my mother and father, who by then were starting to express their feelings—for airships, for each other, for painting and science, and for ideas about how we should all live and behave.
Sometimes my parents resembled Miss America contestants, world peace their motto, starting at home, everyone greeting in apartment hallways, helping folks carry groceries upstairs, but they’d turn three times, spitting ptooey, ptooey, ptooey, when they saw balloons, which they remembered first fearing then hating, though they hated the word hate (eschew, they’d say, with a lift of their chins) and, because they were good at subtraction, they knew what they loved by what they renounced— so much evil abounding then, as now—now, when we’re all trying to lose weight, when it’s something else we need to lose.
Mikki Aronoff lives in New Mexico, where she writes tiny stories and advocates for animals. She has stories in Best Microfiction 2024 and in Best Small Fictions 2024.
