Eggs, cinnamon, flour—honey, do you need anything from the store? I’ll pick up some chocolate milk for you, and I’ll email it to you when I get home. The copy machine will whir, printing the jam you mailed me onto buttered toast, as though you spread it there yourself. I’ll bake bread in the printer’s trays; I’ll write you letters in the crumbs. You’ll text me the rust-red strawberries in your garden, and their juice will bloom sweet on my tongue. I’ll pry the router open with a butter knife and pour in some cake batter. I hope you can taste it from here. When I go to the grocery store I’ll bring my phone and livestream the pyramids of plums—whatever it takes to make the miles spool tight again between us. Let’s not imagine the lights going out. Let’s not think about transformers bursting with sparks, or fallen telephone poles grasping for each other in a brown field, or satellites burning bright enough to wish on in the atmosphere. If you speak on the phone and your voice breaks up, I’ll still believe that you’re there. I’ll set the table for when you come home.
Toby Tegrotenhuis is a writer, a student, a Filipino American, and a lesbian from Lakewood, Colorado. They are a senior in the University of Colorado Denver’s creative writing program, where they also write and copy edit for the student newspaper The Sentry and read on the staff of Copper Nickel. Their work has been previously published in the Allegheny Review.
