Banana Split
The vanilla ice cream slowly melts in the glass bowl, the bright red maraschino cherry bleeding all over the creamy white. Beads of condensation run along the outside walls, pooling onto the table. Kyla watches as a bead of water slides down the curvature and joins its friends on the table, destined to be left alone and dry up.
Kyla silently taps her small metal spoon into the ball of ice cream on the left — it’s chocolate. Tup. The crater makes the ice cream look like a volcano. Tup. Why did she even get a ball of chocolate ice cream? She doesn’t even like chocolate. Tup.
“Dearie, is something wrong? You’ve barely touched your order.” The waitress with bright red lips and a warm voice asks Kyla in an almost nurturing tone. Kyla knows the waitress had introduced herself when she came to take Kyla’s order, but Kyla hadn’t processed a thing she said. Kyla had just placed her order — banana split with chocolate vanilla and butter pecan ice cream please — and stared at the empty seat across from her.
“I’m good.” The woman doesn’t look convinced so Kyla taps her spoon to get the chocolate off and takes a scoop of the butter pecan ice cream on the right. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is a little too sweet and not cold enough. The pecan isn’t even crunchy anymore.
“Mmmm.” Kyla tries to smile at the waitress. The woman looks unconvinced, but has clearly decided that she isn’t paid enough to care this much and leaves. Kyla slumps back, returning to her original task of messing with the ice cream split.
She crushes the cherry and stirs the ice creams. She pokes at the banana, the two sides split by the ocean of melted ice cream, destined to never reunite. Kyla feels her eyes tearing up, so she looks up at the peeling ceiling, blinking against the harsh white fluorescent lights. It’s not the ceiling she’s used to seeing.
Usually when she looks up, she’s wiping tears from her eyes as she laughs so hard her stomach hurts. A lively voice dances through her ears as she takes in the single warm-tone light that hangs above their booth. When she looks back in front of her, she sees a flash of pale skin illuminated by the green neon light that says “Lucy’s Diner.” Platinum blondes strands and a gray eye wisps past in her mind’s eye.
“KYLA!”
Kyla is shaken out of her reverie with a jolt. Suddenly, she’s wrapped up in a warm embrace, a comforting smell of sandalwood and jasmine flowing around her.
“We were so worried!” Kyla’s mom hugs her tighter. “After what happened with Sage…”
She trails off. Kyla buries her face into her mom’s sari. She doesn’t blame her mom for bringing up Sage. Kyla’s parents must have been terrified when they found Kyla gone in the morning when they woke up, the same way Sage’s parents woke up the morning Sage had died.
Kyla feels guilty she made her parents worry so much, but she couldn’t stay in a town that was so familiar, yet so foreign. Every shadow felt distant and terrifying without Sage there to light it up. Grief tore at her when everything reminded her of Sage. So Kyla had left. Ran off to the next city over and found a diner to sit in and dissociate. But even then, everything reminded Kyla of Sage.
Now, the pain of losing Sage wells up in her like clawed hands trying to climb up the inner walls of her mortal body. Her body is wracked with sobs and pain at the reminder her best friend, her girlfriend, her soulmate is gone. Her mom’s sari soaks up the tears, as she pats Kyla on the back.
Kyla cries and cries, as the ice cream on the table continues to melt into the thick soup of sugar, cream, and flavors. The split bananas sink to the bottom of the bowl where they reunite, but can never be one again. As Kyla looks up from the warm darkness of her mom’s sari, she sees the bananas and thinks:
They were kind of like the bananas in the ice cream split. Forever split by the ocean of death and never able to reunite in the same way as before.