Veronica sits in the meager shade of a bush in the Van Nuys World War II
Memorial Park. Her fellow contestants stand behind a portable stage unit
erected on an expanse of dead grass, waiting for their names to be called.
A drawing taped onto one of the unit’s walls shows a hot dog inserted into
a proportionally incorrect mouth. Above it, in block lettered cobalt blue:
ROCKY’S RED HOTS® WIENER INVITATIONAL! One of the event organizers has
rigged up a 90” flat screen, on loan from his living room, upon which the
competition will be projected. A teenaged videographer connects cables and
tests the equipment.

Veronica tunes out the pre-game hubbub, stealing this moment alone to
mentally expand her pyloric canal, her pre-game ritual.

Pyloris. Greek for “gatekeeper.” The Saint Peter of the almighty passage
from stomach to duodenum. Veronica visualizes a robed, ancient man opening
an anatomical gateway, welcoming the oncoming rush of barely masticated hot
dog. Rewarding her for having trained so goddamned hard. Veronica keeps her
eyes closed until she can see every vein in the old man’s hands, the entire
sunken contour of his face, displacing negative images that fight for
center stage in her brain: coming in dead last while the audience howls
with laughter. Her mother’s disappointed face. Begging on a freeway onramp
with her kids. It is only when the old man is so real she can see the
tiniest hair growing out of the tiniest nose pimple that she declares
herself ready.

Veronica’s been in training since the last bout, a deeply humiliating
nugget rib competition in Sparks, Nevada. Okay, maybe this particular
competition is a couple of rungs down on the prestige ladder, but it’s a
step toward rehabilitating her tarnished image. And she had been doing so
well! A string of wins. Modest wins, to be sure, but crucial steps. She
imagines herself competing before a crowd of over 10,000 with continuous
coverage on ESPN. That’s how popular the sport has become. It’s only a
matter of time until the entire world bears witness as she accepts the
Seventh Annual Mickleberg Trophy: legacy of Dave “Foot Long” Mickleberg,
who rocked the competitive eating world in 1994 by consuming fifty
intensely spiced Merguez sausages in under ten minutes. Shortly afterward,
during a chorizo competition, he died a gruesome and public death thanks to
a microdot of intestinal casing that adhered to a fissure in his windpipe.
It happens. Almost as often as you’d think. An Arizona woman’s stomach
exploded after an oyster event. Every sport has an element of danger.
Otherwise, thinks Veronica, why do it?

The Mickleberg Trophy Grand Prize: Fifty thousand dollars.

Oh, let me at it!
Veronica says out loud to the popcorn ceiling as she lies, churning, in bed
every night. She sees herself, single mother of two, dancing in a snowfall
of legal tender. Her erotic fantasies consist of on-time car payments,
credit cards with a zero balance. Braces for ten-year-old James, late thumb
sucker. A keyboard for musical Cassandra, thirteen, disaffected girl-child
approaching the front lines of adolescent warfare. Also months of future
rent payments luxuriating like fat vacationers by the pool in a high
interest account. And, because time marches on, especially around the
jawline, a lower quadrant facelift to ensure her future in the PR aspect of
the sport. And she’s ready. Okay, maybe she wasn’t ready in Sparks. Not
quite. But now. Hell to the fucking yeah.

Today, however, it’s the Rocky’s Red Hots competition. She can live with
that. Two thousand for the winner. July’s rent and change. Nothing to
sneeze at when you still owe for June. Also an endorsement deal with the
chain’s in-house brand: Rocky’s Mega-Hots (They’ve got SNAP!) soon
to make its statewide debut at Wal-Mart. There is real competition even in
these lower-level events. Sometimes heavy hitters show up, considering it a
training session with prize money. Do enough of these a year, cop a couple
of endorsement deals, and bam! An eater can make a living doing what she
was put on earth to do.

Veronica’s six years in the “world” started when the kids were small and
worshipful, sitting at the kitchen table in the Canoga Park condo timing
her as she speed- ate whatever was around. Kid food in those days. Lucky
Charms. Goldfish. Pizza Pockets. Veronica had always been a binger and a
chewer. She passed through bulimia on her way to self-cannibalism, eating
the skin on the sides of her fingers, her hair, her upper lip. A Donner
party of one. For all those who told her to “stop picking” she now has
three words: Fifty. Thousand. Dollars.

Her kids cheered her on, realizing that speed eating made Mom nicer. And
happier. Happier than working for Time Warner Cable tech support. Which she
still does, feigning interest in people’s forgotten passwords, pretending
to be patient as they pull the wrong cords out of modems, cursing her for
not being able to jump through the phone and make everything right again.
But soon TWTS will be a distant a memory since winnings have risen to these
levels. And since her training regimen has been nothing short of Olympian.

She’s had to miss too many days of work because of the demands of training.
Last week her supervisor informed her, barely containing his glee, that
Veronica is on probation. The kids don’t know. And their “father,” who has
been couch surfing through the greater Boston area for the past five years,
could give a flying fuck.

But fifty thousand. Some day. No question about that!

“T-Rex Van Horn?” Says a guy with a walkie-talkie, one eyeball atrophied,
focused somewhere east of her face.

“That’s me.”

“Been looking all over for you.”

“I like to prepare alone.”

“Didn’t I see you in Sparks?”

“I guess you must have, if you were there.”

“Jesus! That was, well. That sure was a –“

“Just tell me when I need to go out there, okay?” Veronica snaps,
irritated. She knows where he was going with “That sure was a . . .”

The truth is, she had vomited. At the crucial moment, neck-in-neck for the
lead. Immediate disqualification, even for the slightest drop, case closed.
The judges examined the offending chunk of gristle to see if it had never
made it into her mouth or was, in fact, a reversal of fortune. They
confirmed the latter. “Cancel, cancel,” she whispers as she follows the
man. “Cancel all negative thoughts.” Fucker trying to psych her out! Well,
she thinks, good luck with that. “You will live a short life and
die in unspeakable pain,” she mutters under her breath.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh. Well, like I was saying, that was some crazy ass shit there in
Sparks,” says the man, who just happens to be contestant Gut Man Gifford’s
sycophant, his simpering Ed McMahon. He’s walking backwards now, so he can
look at her. “What was it, bit off more than you could chew?”

Sparks had been a leap, that’s for sure, a world-class event for the big
boys. Jumbotron, local news coverage, participation stipend, etc. Veronica
had barely squeaked in as the underdog. Her mother and the kids had been
there, as always, watching helplessly as a referee led her, hunched and
shaking, from the competition table to a Clorox-scented bathroom where she
lay on the cold floor retching and bawling. At least that part wasn’t on
camera.

“Well, anyways, they need you,” says the man. Then, into the walkie-talkie,
“Got T-Rex in transit, do you copy?” The response is a meow in a blast of
static.

“Wilco,” he says to the speaker holes. Then, to Veronica, indicating the
bathrooms with the antenna, “Wait over there until they call your name.”

Veronica surveys the crowd from behind the restroom building, located a few
feet from the competition area. All of the one hundred or so folding chairs
are taken. Over fifty other spectators stand around the periphery. A few
others lie on blankets, faces purpling in the sun. A fat guy in the front
row pours ice water down the neck of his t-shirt. Someone breaks up a
dogfight. The referee, black and white striped shirt with a whistle, steps
up to the mic on a raised platform and calls for the first contestant. Next
to him is the long competition table. Coolers and water buckets at each
place.

“CUR MCGINTY.”

The crowd gives him a respectful welcome. A few whoops. Someone toots an
air horn, causing a baby to shriek in terror.

Christ, thinks Veronica. Cur McGinty. That embarrassment to the sport. From
where she stands, she can see him run out, shirtless, doing his asinine
“hula hoop” torso swing, swiveling his balloon gut before he takes his
place at the competition table, making the audience go wild. In Veronica’s
opinion he embodies every stereotype: fat, slovenly and undisciplined. Even
his name, “Cur.” A junkyard dog, a lack of refinement. An old school,
county fair, face-down-in-a-berry-pie chipmunker.

“WHIP STANTON.”

Wait. What?

No! Please God, no. Not Whip Stanton. He was not on the
program. He didn’t compete in Sparks, thank God, and Veronica hasn’t seen
him in months. Damn the World Competitive Eating Association. Damn them to
hell! Notorious for adding surprise contestants at the last minute.

Of course he gets a huge response. For this crowd it’s Mick Jagger sitting
in with the bar band. A group in the back, who must have been tipped off,
unfurls a banner that says, “WHIP ‘EM STANTON.”

Veronica feels her blood dance at the sound of his name and hates herself
for it. Whip Stanton. He of the signature five-foot ponytail.
Creator of the popular Stanton Technique, involving humming and the crucial
role of vibration in the ingestion process. Whip Stanton, with whom she
shouldn’t have slept those twenty-seven times. Who she never should have
introduced to her kids, thinking for one deluded moment she’d found the
only person in the entire world who would ever understand her.

Instead, she realized she’d been mere filler until a younger, more battered
soul came along. And hell yeah she came along. Took last place in the
Nathan’s Competition, but obviously Whip didn’t give a shit about that. Not
with those tits. Not with that drug problem. Veronica stood a chance. What
man could care-take So she sat and watched the image of herself and Whip as
a competition Power Couple pixilate and disappear. Fuck him and his
ponytail and his humming technique. But, still. But, still. Whip Stanton. The things he taught her. Oh, fuck him to hell!

“GUT MAN GIFFORD.”

The Sparks Grand Champion himself, wearing a cape, for God’s sake,
his recent run of victories clearly having gone to his head. Not to mention
the merchandising. When Veronica arrived at the venue she saw a booth
hawking Gut Man detritus: T-shirts, posters, the slightly out of focus
video, Gut Feeling, in which he discusses his training techniques,
welling up as he laments the death of his father, Ribeye Gifford, who
taught him every technique he knew right there at the family dinner table
as his mother lovingly looked on. Supposedly.

“T-REX VAN HORN.”

Veronica walks out onto the field and, sneaking a glance at the TV screen,
positions herself in a perfectly centered, full body shot. T-Rex. So named
because the T-Rex could devour five hundred pounds of meat in one bite. A
shrill, in unison “MOM,” emanates from the back row, making up for the
slight dip in applause. She makes sure Whip Stanton is watching and lifts
her T-shirt exposing her lithe torso, her exquisitely flat stomach. One
hundred fifteen pounds, motherfuckers! The result of months of cabbage,
seaweed and water for breakfast, lunch and dinner, followed by two weeks of
clear liquids. Except, of course, for strategically spaced training
sessions. She raises her fists in the air and turns, slowly, so everyone
can experience the 360 of her. Still, a tepid response. The glass ceiling,
triple-paned.

Cur McGinty, in a second-grade level humor moment, makes retching noises.
He didn’t compete in Sparks, but he, like thousands of other non compos
menti enjoyed Veronica’s moment of shame, played and replayed in an endless
loop on EatFeats. The front rows, within earshot, laugh their carnivorous
asses off. Veronica takes her assigned seat at the table, next to Whip
Stanton.

She allows herself one inhale’s worth of fear, and then recreates the old
man, in clear focus this time. She knows she’s back in the zone when
everything around her, every bird, every stretched-out cloud makes her want
to swallow it whole, feeling it slither through every exquisite curve of
her intestine.

Veronica feels the head-clearing effects of a new water training technique,
which has gently expanded her stomach capacity without wasting energy
digesting solids. That was her downfall in Sparks. Chicken wing training.
Rookie mistake.

She will not be cowed by her proximity to Whip Stanton. Ever the
competitor, he’d love nothing more than to throw her off her game. She can
feel his sinister vibrations attempting to invade her pores. Cancel,
cancel, she whispers. Cancel all negative thoughts. She turns to him and
smiles. The one he returns is not genuine. It ended badly. She shouldn’t
have keyed his mint condition Barracuda, for instance. But then he
shouldn’t have offered to give Cassandra guitar lessons. Getting her hopes
up like that! Cassie even braided his hair once and then bragged about it
to the kids at school. Never mind that they said, “Whip who?”

“A guy who can eat his weight in hot dogs,” she’d told them. “That’s who!”
Which resulted in Cassie running home in tears after inadvertently creating
a nickname for herself: “Dog Turd.” A name that lived on long after Whip
was out of the picture.

But, still. Why didn’t you pick us? Veronica silently beseeches
him. You could have had it all. Instant family. Supporters for life.
Then, trying to sound casual, showing him that she’s the new, improved
version of herself, ready to be pals, maybe kicking off the friendship with
drinks, just the two of them, after the competition, she says, “Hot dogs.
Classic.”

“I’m sorry?” says Whip, and rips out his ear buds, irritated that Veronica
has punctured the spell of his mental preparation. Also probably still mad
about the car.

“I was just saying that hot dogs are sort of –”

Whip reattaches his ear buds.

Motherfucker. Veronica regrets her moment of weakness and tries to conjure
the old man. But all she musters are Whip’s guitar callused fingertips.
Whip’s eyes are closed. He hums “Hotel California.” Veronica knows him so
well! She knows he’s listening to his lucky album and that he didn’t sleep
last night due to anticipatory anxiety.

But still. He needs the money less than she does. He’s the new face of
Curly’s Smokehouse Franks, she discovered with a pang while shopping in the
meat section of Smart ‘N Final.

Everyone is in deep preparation. Gut Man makes strangulation noises,
loosening his Adam’s Apple. Cur does “the wave,” an undulating move that he
has explained, in after game interviews, mimics the journey of a food
morsel through the gastric system. As if he could have come up with that
himself. As if this crowd has never heard of Kobayashi.

So this time it’s hot dogs. They tell you the basics, but then you take
what they throw you. “Hot dog” could mean anything from cocktail franks to
knockwurst. And God only knows what kind of bun.

A couple of referees pull the lid off the metal tubs at each contestant’s
side and after a countdown, underscored by neon, graphic numbers on the TV,
the announcer says, “Let the competition begin.”

Ball parks on a dense seeded bagel bun, the bastards. Veronica starts
slowly, undoing another mistake she made in Sparks. Dunking is permitted in
this contest, so she dips the hot dog and bun into the pail of water to
soften the bread. Small bites are best. Veronica learned the hard way that
excessive chewing leads to jaw fatigue, so the trick is to take small bites
that can be swallowed whole. Her personal goal for this ten-minute contest:
thirty dogs. Unheard of until now.

The first three go down well. The hot dogs have been slathered with ketchup
as a crowd-pleasing measure. People want to see a mess that evokes carnage.
The next three slither down with, so far, no tooth-to-tooth contact, throat
muscles fully engaged. Veronica tries not to get cocky. It’s still early.
She glances at Gut Man who is utilizing his personalized “cat/bird”
technique: neck stretched back, dog pointing skyward and then sucked down,
his throat muscles contracting so vigorously that they sever the dog into
digestible chunks. Too early for that, Veronica thinks. His esophagus will
rebel. That’s a move for the home stretch. Cur’s face and hair are
slathered with ketchup and water as he, head down, eats as if from a
trough. Making a spectacle of himself, the troll.

After ten hot dogs Veronica feels a bit of pyloric churning, but expects
that.

“SIX MORE MINUTES,” yells the referee into the mic.

Veronica sees her enlarged face on the TV, and even in the fever of
competition angles it to the less fat side, the one with the more
accentuated cheekbone. Never trust the PR people and their selective use of
the images, which can be frozen into stills and resurface in promotional
materials. Another lesson learned the hard way. Granted, it was a smaller
competition – a boiled egg event. Veronica was thrown by a handout upon
which her face appeared, looking every minute of her sun-damaged forty-six
years, and then some. No one claps for that. No one hires that to promote their lunchmeat.

But today, beautiful. Just a hint of ketchup. Enough to make her lips look
full and luscious. Veronica is astonished by her sense of calm. The
training is paying off. But the next five dogs start to feel like work, and
she finally enlists her teeth into the game. She takes small bites. A bit
of casing gets lodged in her throat, making her cough. Fuck! “Going down
the wrong tube” is another way of saying “Everything you’ve ever wanted and
worked for has just evaporated into utter nothingness.” No way she’s going
to pull a Mickelberg. Not today.

But thank the universe and Veronica’s steel-trap esophageal canal, it’s
only a momentary setback. Three more dogs go down without incident.

“THREE MINUTES.” Twelve to go to reach thirty.

On one of their twenty-seven nights Whip lectured her on the pointlessness
of vomiting when Veronica revealed her teenage bulimic period..

“I get it,” he said. “It’s a girl thing. But, baby what a waste. What lack
of respect for this fucking awesome machine we were born with.” He
underscored this last point by drawing his finger down Veronica’s throat,
slowly, all the way to the crotch of her cut-offs. “Why cheat your
intestines? Let them do their magical thing.”

Now the great Whip Stanton is retching. The moment is palpable. Veronica
senses a pause in everyone’s chewing. But he recovers and swallows with his
characteristic hum. He taught her, on their one rainy night, that humming
creates a vibrating tunnel that dampens the gag reflex. A technique she’s
grateful to know. Veronica remembers watching his scrunchy slide off,
freeing his hair, which fell onto his shoulders in a terrifyingly sexy way.
Oh that night! It was they best they’d had. The kids were at her mother’s.
After sex they’d speed-eaten Slim Jims, feeding each other. Critiquing each
other’s technique. It was the most intimate moment Veronica had ever shared
with another human being.

A small bird hops on the table looking for crumbs. Veronica uses up a
precious second shooing it away with her hand. There was that time, near
the beach, when a seagull snatched a chicken taco right out of the King of
the Southland’s hand, costing him the title. A mountain lion could come
wandering in and it would be the competitor’s fault, even if he were
dragged off and disembowled. His memory disgraced by failing to handle the
situation as per regulation.

Four more dogs, and damn those bun seeds, now sticking to the sides of her
throat like pictures hanging in a hallway. Veronica stands to help the
downward gravitational pull. Home stretch time. She tries to breathe
through the panic. She glances again at the TV screen. Her eyes are
tearing, mixing with ketchup as if she, like Our Lady of Akita, is weeping
blood. Whip Stanton is humming so loud it rattles her skull. “Life in the
Fast Lane.”

Nothing left but the cat/bird, which she’s only practiced once,
unsuccessfully. Oh to have a man’s throat at this moment! She imagines St.
Peter, swinging opening the gates of fortune, ushering her in. She tilts
her head back and holds the dripping mess up toward the sky. Clouds blow
by. Tiny birds fly through her fingers.

“You have the spark,” Whip had said, fondling her neck after she swallowed
the last of the Slim Jims. “Yes, sexy girl. You do. I see it in your throat
muscles, especially the oncothyroid. Your clavicular and sternal heads
leave me in awe. Where did you come from anyways? Are you even from the
planet Earth?” A string of colored Christmas lights twinkled just outside
the window of his ‘71 Airstream Ambassador as he spoke, making his hair
look like it was on fire.

Veronica hadn’t even known she had a clavicular head. That’s how green she
was when he found her. She had already worked out, privately, how they
would all live together in the Airstream. She googled “modify airstream”
and it all seemed so possible. James would have a loft compartment near the
ceiling. Cassandra’s bed would roll out from under the dining table. A tent
add-on would be the homework area.

Veronica can smell Whip’s patchouli oil. She hums a lullaby her mother used
to sing while inching the torpedo down her throat. Little birdie in a tree, in a tree, in a tree. Gags once but
breathes through it. Another hot dog makes it into the Kingdom of Heaven.
The referee sounds the final whistle.

All four contestants lift their hands up. Whip rips out his ear buds, wipes
his face on a towel. Gut Man raises his fists and gives a Tarzan yell. Cur,
showman that he is, staggers to the front of the competition table and
pretends to pass out, making the audience roar. The judges check each
contestant for chipmunking – holding food in their cheeks for more than
thirty seconds, another disqualifier.

Veronica, still exhilarated from the cat/bird, looks out to the audience,
on its feet, different sections screaming different names. The judges count
the remaining hot dogs. I did it! She thinks. Okay, maybe I didn’t reach
thirty, but I never paused even once! Even Whip doesn’t stand a chance
against me. He retched. That’s the sound of precious seconds
slipping away. That’s the sound of a man down.

Whip Stanton frees his ponytail and gets a rise out of the crowd. His hair
wraps his face in a sudden gust of Santa Ana wind. Veronica wants to chew
on it, impregnate herself with his hairball. Look at it! So pretty,
glinting vermillion in the sun. He’s used a rinse to cover the gray.
Veronica feels an upsurge of longing. Damn you!

We could have aged together. Together we could have slowed the long
march toward invisibility. How could SHE ever understand that?

But, wait, she thinks, and snaps back into T-Rex again. What I really mean
to say is:

Motherfucker you are going down. Did you see me execute a perfect
cat/bird? Huh? Did you see that, Whip? Did you see that?

The referee trips as he steps up on the platform but regains his footing.

“We have a winner,” he says into the mic.

I sure as shit am
! thinks Veronica, as she calculates the withholding on fifty grand,
subtracting two month’s rent, the price of James’ braces and Cassandra’s
keyboard, realizing that the jawline may have to wait for the next win.

“WHIP STANTON.”

Veronica lowers her arms, which were already half raised in victory. She is
confused for a moment, as if the referee were speaking a different
language. She looks at everyone, searching for an interpreter among them.What did he say? For a second I thought he said Whip Stanton. What does that mean?

A huge ovation. Love radiating from the audience, wrapping Whip in its
toxic glow.

Cur McGinty, accustomed to losing, slaps Whip on the back and gives the
audience the thumbs up. But Gut Man is pissed. He glowers at the judges.
Everyone remembers the time in Laguna Niguel when he upended the table
after a loss. The guy with the atrophied eye anticipates this and puts his
hand on Gut Man’s shoulder. Gut Man pushes him off with such force that the
guy falls backward onto the dirt.

There he is, The Great Stanton, in person and on the TV screen, wiping a
stray bit of ketchup from his ear with a towel. There he is, in close-up,
revealing the front tooth that overlaps the one next to it. There he is, a
statue erected in a park. There he is, the face of Curly’s Smokehouse
Franks, who will, undoubtedly, be lured from them one day in the not too
distant future by Oscar Fucking Meyer.

Friends and family rush the competition area and Veronica sees Whip’s
young, bra-less project flopping toward him. They kiss and she grabs
fistfuls of his hair, exposing his tarantula neck tattoo.

Veronica’s kids run over, out of breath. Her mom a few yards back, limping.

“He Chipmunked! I saw him!” says James.

“Totally,” says Cassandra. “Plus, he like puked a little and nobody said
anything. So unfair.”

Veronica had been coy about the prize money, so the kids have no idea what
they’re missing. They don’t feel what she feels at this moment: a snake
writhing in boiling oil in the upper region of her ribcage. They don’t
realize that they are days away from losing the condo and moving, all three
of them, into their grandmother’s studio apartment in Reseda with its
pullout couch in the living room. All that training! Veronica could have
done better. It was Whip’s fault, slamming her back to those twenty-seven
nights she’d worked so hard to cancel, cancel, cancel.

“But anyways you looked really hot on the TV,” says Cassandra. Then,
lowering her voice, “Whip’s girlfriend’s side boob is showing.”

A host of sparrows descend on the competition table to reap the remains:
saliva puddles dotted with islands of soggy bun, stray meat particles,
ketchup covered in flies. A Santa Ana kicks up, plastering a paper napkin
against Veronica’s thigh.

“Hey, congratulations,” she says to Whip, who stands not ten feet away, his
girl rubbing his distended gut like they’re expecting. No answer, even
though he’s looking right at her. His girlfriend whispers something in his
ear and he kisses the top of her head.

The referee and the guy with the atrophied eye walk out with a huge
$2,000.00 cardboard check with “Whip Stanton” written in Sharpie on the top
line. They get Whip to stand with them in front of the videographer, who
shoots from a crouched position, making them look like giants. The audience
whoops and applauds.

“Come on, Rons, let’s go,” says Veronica’s mom, wincing, putting her arm on
Veronica’s shoulder. “Let’s beat the rush before you have to carry me out
of here. My knee’s about to go.” She takes a Kleenex from her purse and
wipes ketchup from a strand of Veronica’s hair. “Maybe time to rethink all
of this, hon?” She licks an arthritic finger and wipes her daughter’s
cheek.

Veronica takes in the scene: Whip Stanton posing with his girlfriend, Gut
Man arguing with a judge a few yards away. Cur throwing up in a trash can,
his usual post-game ritual.

Her mom keeps talking. “I mean, honey I guess I just don’t see what you –”

Cancel, cancel, thinks Veronica, putting her hands over her ears. Even my
mother who deeply cares. Cancel my mother. Do what a champion would do in a
crushing moment of defeat. Be big.

Veronica walks away from her mom and over to Whip and his girlfriend. I’m a
champion, she thinks. A champion is generous. When the game is over, a
champion (albeit momentarily) puts herself last.

“Hey, Whip. Seriously. Congratulations. You’re the master.” Veronica holds
out her hand.

Whip and his girlfriend exchange a look that says That’s the nutcase who keyed the car. The girlfriend, feeling smug
in her role as common-law Mrs. Stanton, probably says, when they’re lying
in bed, post-coital, things like, “Listen, babe, why waste energy being
mad? Let’s feel sorry for her. She’s crazy. Poor thing! And so old. Tell me I’ll never look that old!”

“Oh baby,” he probably says, fondling her clown tits. “Don’t you worry. You
could never look that old.”

But there’s nothing like the magnanimity of victory to let bygones be
bygones, and Whip accepts her hand. Veronica massages it, feeling the
guitar calluses, the lifeline she once traced with her tongue. There are
red, crescent moons under his nails.

Veronica ignores Whip’s attempts to pull his hand away and tightens her
grip. She lifts his hand and smells it. Patchouli and hot dog juice. Mixed
with something that must have rubbed off from the girl. Baby powder. She
licks it to stimulate her olfactory taste buds. Yes, the particular nausea
provoked by baby powder.

“What the fuck?” says the girlfriend and tries to slap Veronica’s hand
away, but Veronica grips harder. She bites down and feels the snap of
Whip’s skin breaking, her teeth clamping onto bone.

“Get her off me!” Whip yells. “Jesus fucking Christ!” Whip’s blood salts
her mouth. He struggles but her fulcrum is in peak condition, a fiercely
activated jaw joint. She couldn’t let go if she tried. Wouldn’t.

The referee and the guy with the atrophied eye are pulling at her. Someone
tries to pry her mouth open. Veronica hears her mother and children calling
to her. Or maybe screaming. Cancel, cancel. She thinks. Cancel all you
doubters, you second-guessers. I’m an eater! Let me eat!

A volunteer goon from the audience slaps the back of her head, forcing her
teeth apart.

“Motherfucker!” yells Whip Stanton, yanking his hand away. His girlfriend
examines his bleeding palm. Someone hands him a towel. “Get her out of
here, that batshit crazy bitch!” he says, hyperventilating.

Veronica takes a step toward Whip. The guy with the atrophied eye wrestles
her to the ground and restrains her as she kicks at the air.

“You gonna stop kicking? You gonna stop?” he says, his knees pinning her
shoulders. “You gonna stop spitting in my face?”

“Cancel, cancel,” she hisses, staring him down.

“What?”

“You’re crushing my transverse humeral ligament.”

Veronica closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to know if her kids are
watching. She takes a deep breath. She’ll explain it all to them tonight.
She’ll give them the Notes From the Real World talk she was reserving for
their late-teen years. The We Sometimes Do What We Wish We Didn’t Have To
Do lecture. Don’t be scared, she’ll say.

Yes, Mom’s a little stressed, that’s true. But it’s not her fault,
kids. Not at all! Mom’s just trained very, very hard and is a little
disappointed that –

A siren screams and drowns out her thoughts, moving closer. Veronica
conjures the old man in glorious, mind-bending detail. He’s smiling at her
in such sharp focus that she sees a piece of food stuck between his canine
and incisor. He opens an enormous wrought iron gate and ushers her into
another time, before there was a Van Nuys World War II Memorial Park,
before there had ever even been a war, or people, or hot dogs, or rent
payments or Whip Stanton. Sixty million years ago, when the mighty T-Rex
ruled the world.