a whopper—fiction by Chelsea Patey

we are maybe an hour outside san francisco and you are in the lineup for burger king and it is your first time. jean francois tells you to get a whopper and matthew tells you to get a whopper but you get a chicken wrap, later wishing you had instead gotten a whopper. we eat slowly on the asphalt and you try to explain where you are from and why you have never eaten a whopper before. they have trouble comprehending isolation and you have trouble comprehending their trouble comprehending. here you wonder if anyone knows loneliness like you know loneliness. 

  

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Chelsea Patey: newfoundland, slowly/deliberately