I live in a gingerbread house. But I’m not a gingerbread man. Permanent icing snow outside, spearmint gels for bushes, nonpareils for siding. I’m not lost in the forest but somewhere in the suburbs. Sometimes my girlfriend comes over and I have to follow her as she walks around, making sure she doesn’t snap off a piece of the wall or floor, keeping bags of chips and cookies handy to sate her hunger. She won’t stay for long because thin crisp cookies provide no insulation. Yeah, it’s cold at night, so I huddle up alone, clutching a Gummi bear. I am resilient, able to resist the sweet walls around me. I cook lots of beef and potatoes to prevent self-induced homelessness. Don’t ask me what happens when it rains, when the wind kicks up and nonpareils fly off into space; it’s hard finding a reliable expert in cookie house maintenance. Eventually my girlfriend will see the thinness of my cookie-encased world and leave, snapping me in two. Sometimes it would be easier to be a gingerbread man. A frosted smile painted forever on my face. A flat two-dimensional life. I’m all too real, though, in a house that will crumble away, a life that will end packed in a box.
Gingerbread
Christian Bell lives near Baltimore, Maryland. His fiction has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, JMWW, Pindeldyboz, SKiVE Magazine, Tattoo Highway, and flashquake.