Donut Holes

I felt thirsty but didn’t have anything to drink so instead I ate. I opened the fridge and saw some extra pulp orange juice – a favorite of mine, but it wasn’t mine and earlier I already stole a glass. The rice from last night’s midnight dinner stacked to the ceiling in of fridge on top of the eggs, nearly touching the light, but I didn’t feel like eating it after seeing the water had congealed and being brown rice it congealed to a bramble appearance of sorts. I ate the ice cream for breakfast and didn’t buy the oranges either.  I had bacon and eggs for lunch and popcorn for a snack and any one item I noticed that varied from those I either didn’t buy and therefore could not eat or if I saw anything else it simply wouldn’t wet my palette. I hadn’t smoked a cigarette since the night prior and would have certainly loved to do that instead. I forgot to turn my apartment’s heater off. In the past I’d sit next to the window, smoke, and let in a little cold air and snowflakes to settle in, but it simply wouldn’t make sense for me to sit on the edge of the couch with the window open and no cigarette. So instead I walked to the bodega. Usually I’m smoking on the way to the but since I didn’t have any cigarettes I thought of how I didn’t have a job and how I need a job and how I have to pay to credit cards in eight days and how I had to pay rent in fifteen, and utilities in fifteen, and how much the subway costs, and how much food costs, and how I’ll probably find a job soon.

The snow had melted. My shoes are fine for walking on snow, and even sometimes in snow, but never in rain or melted snow. Within fifteen paces I could tell the temperature by the water in my shoes. Usually I just known from the wind striking my nose – I have an enormous nose, or by how cold my smoking hand is, but since I don’t smoke anymore and I hadn’t been outside long enough, I gauged it by my feet. If you feel how cold your feet are and add that by how cold you think the snow is and add how cold you remember it being last, then divide that number by three, you should know what the temperature is. Today the temperature was twenty-five.

I usually buy coffee for fifty-cents at the bodega when I’m there to solely defeat cabin fever, but never in the evening time, so I settled on donut holes. My grandmother use to buy donut holes for me as a child and I had only eaten them once since. I’d show up and she’d either have donut holes, Jello, or hot dogs with mayo. I remember really enjoying them all. The last time I ate donut holes I ‘d been walking home after my car broke down. I stopped in at a diner for some food, tired of walking and really just wanting to just be home – cell phones hardly existed at this point, especially with teenagers. I glanced over the pictured menu and couldn’t decided between chicken fried steak, a steak, or eggs when a homeless man came and sat across from me, pulled a Swiss Army knife from his dirty shirt pocket, pulled out all of the blades one by one, set the built in tweezers and plastic toothpick on the table, and slid it across the table and said, “ I’ll sell it to you for five dollars. There’s twenty-six knives on here, that’s 35 cents a knife.” I’ve never been exceptional at math and certainly couldn’t do that sort of math in my head so I declined the offer, not because his math had been wrong, but because I already had a knife. Instead of ordering chicken fried steak, steak, or eggs, I walked across the street to a gas station and bought a half dozen donut holes, a jalapeño and cheese corndog, and my first pack of cigarettes and started smoking – and starting eating corndogs.

I took the donut holes back to my house. On the walk home the water in my shoes became warmer and I couldn’t tell if the body heat in my toes just rose to compensate for the degrees lost from the melted snow or if the melted snow just became warmer since I had been in the store. For a moment I thought my theory of temperature might be flawed, but became distracted after the idea of using Christmas trees for legs on the table top I had found a day earlier. I’d need a hatchet – I stopped to think of how to spell hatchet because I’d forgotten. One Ts or two? I remembered hatchet had only one T and that I didn’t have a hatchet and it’d be cheaper to buy 2×4s to use for legs on the chair rather than buy a hatchet.

I decided to take the elevator to my apartment because I thought it’d be funny to use a freight elevator to bring donut holes up to my apartment. The terrible graffiti distracted me and I got of on the fifth floor instead of the fourth. I took the stairs down, guessing how many times people had slept in the stairwell, not wanting to know how many times people have pissed in it, nor remembering if I had or not.

Finally I turned left into the fourth floor door and started to walk towards my apartment. I turned the corner as the same time as an ugly woman wearing an old coat and scared her. She didn’t seem to forgive me after I said sorry and even her dog ogled me for a moment.

Finally home, I set the donut holes on the counter and realized they were sugar rather than glazed.  Glazed was always my favorite and I really never have once in my life cared for a sugar coated donut, or donut hole. Since my roommates weren’t home I poured a glass of orange juice and added about a half cup of water to the carton so that if they noticed I had dipped into the orange juice they wouldn’t notice that I took so much but maybe would let me off the hook because sometimes you really need orange juice, and besides, they ate a bag of my rice. I cooked a half-cup of rice last night and couldn’t finish it; an entire bag would fill up the sink. Then I took out the cookies and cream ice cream and ate it out of the carton and felt guilty. I put it back, drank the juice, ate a donut hole and fell asleep on the couch.

I woke up and felt bad because I forgot to read a NY Times I stole from my neighbors. I fell asleep again, hoping I wouldn’t wake up for a very long time, but instead I woke up thirty minutes later. I tried again and woke up fifteen minutes later.