sarah mclaughlin

Chicken Nuggets After Sex

With the strange way the apartment was set up, the couch was two feet away from the oven. So, it was only natural.

We lay tangled in silence, save for the hum of the vents as they pumped heat into the still December air—still, save for the tick of our mental clock as we waited for the lock on the common room door to click.

Our hands combed through each other’s gnarled hair, grown far past the tops of our shoulders. We both mentioned needing trims when we went home for break—especially those little face-framing pieces you cut for me with the safety scissors I’d carried in my backpack since third grade. They were almost short enough to be considered bangs.

“They’re called face-framing pieces,” you said.

“Slut strands,” I replied.

This was our language.

The sudden vibration between our stomachs shook us with laughter. We weren’t even sure whose had grumbled. We both realized it was nearly 8:30pm, and we hadn’t eaten lunch. Those were the days when fifteen minutes between classes weren’t for eating but for finding empty single bathrooms, hidden alleys between library stacks, or dark, abandoned labs in the basement of the science building.

Those were the days when the future felt too imminent, before it boarded a spaceship and traveled many light-years away. When it felt like taking our diplomas would mean taking our lives a la Juliet and Romeo.

We didn’t try to starve ourselves, but it was less of a priority to spend half an hour dousing french fries with ranch in the crowded dining hall and than it was to sneak away to the piano classrooms, sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the wooden bench, and feel your hair tickle my ear as you watched me play.

Hunger caught up to us eventually, most days, and our weary limbs craved nothing more than to open the freezer and wait while the air fryer did all the work.

So, chicken nuggets was our choice. The ones shaped like little dinosaurs, because they were a drop in the pool of our collective childhood nostalgia, as were so many things to which we clung.

As they cooked, we picked up our discarded sweatpants and pulled the waistbands up over our legs, which by then had grown cold. We discarded our bras in laundry bags and reveled in the feeling of our bare skin against the inside of our hoodies. Cold and warm air washed over us in pleasurable waves, depending on where in the kitchen we stood. And we stretched our arms in arcs above our heads and opened our jaws in wide yawns as the air fryer ticked.

This was December. We knew Christmas would come and go, and so would the winter, and the spring, and this apartment. We didn’t dare speak it into existence; we didn’t dare disrupt the pleasurable air.

We didn’t know that soon we would rely on the most simple things to feel something—the taste of decaf coffee, the scent of rain, the crunch of a particularly large leaf.

We knew it would be different without each other in constant reach, but we didn’t know how our senses had become so accustomed to each other’s constant intensity.

Maybe, we wondered, we’d spend more time eating.

We blocked out the sound of the oncoming train, because we didn’t want to hear its final call.

Sarah McLaughlin’s short stories and poetry have been published in Rundelania, Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, The Alembic, and The Cowl, and she was also selected to present her short fiction at Sigma Tau Delta's Centennial Convention in 2024. She has a B.A. in Creative Writing from Providence College and resides in southeastern Massachusetts. Selections of her work can be found at www.sarahmclaughlinwrites.wordpress.com.