I will eat the two mochi I bought at the fancy grocery store near my office. I will eat them before I try to eat the salad I also picked up, the same Caesar as my many years’ worth of Caesars from there. The mochi fridge is a new thing, right there at the checkout, with flavors like chai latte and turmeric because this is California baby!— and lavender-lemon, which probably looks good but might taste like a sachet. I got the blood orange and the pistachio, the pistachio looking the way you’d expect, but the blood orange being pinkish-purple inside, lovely against the orange casing. All this, because I had a biopsy on my lip this week, one that revealed nothing except that my face doesn’t like lidocaine, as I’m still puffed and numb, four days later, having taken double Benadryl and used all the ice packs. I even tried one of those quartz roller things that reminds me of assisting on a job where we printed the famous artist’s work outside on the street—the paper was massive—using a steamroller and old blankets. I mean, compare that day to now, mochi gone, sad little salad by my left arm, antihistamine haze clouding my desire to open the file I’ve just been sent, with the the chirpy “Good luck with this one” on the header. But also, compare this day to one I’ve never had, maybe one where I get a call that the doctor needs to dig further into my face, or I lose this gig where I’m paid to read all day, or maybe a day where I discover I married the first fiancé instead of waiting for the second, and never came back to California and its incessant cheer and good fortune.
Linda Michel-Cassidy's story collection, When We Were Hardcore, was published in early 2025 by EastOver Press. She is a senior reviews and hybrid/collab editor at Tupelo Quarterly. She lives on a houseboat in Northern California.
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