How to Eat a Spam Sandwich

Your husband is out at the bar again. The house is clean. You’re hungry, but the pantry is empty.

Grandma Ruth and Aunt Madeline

Clip on your best earrings. You love a good piece of jewelry, even of the costume variety. Apply some red lipstick. Spritz some floral perfume. Slip into your trench coat and pearl-dotted gloves.

It may only be Toledo, and it may only be the grocery store, but you never know. Elvis could make an appearance in produce.

Plus, even when money is scarce, it’s important to always look your best.

Begin your one-mile walk downtown.

At Tiedtke’s, add Spam, Kraft American Cheese, and Wonder Bread to your cart. Pay with change from your pocketbook.

Head home, sandwich ingredients in hand.

Once there, open your bag of bread and can of meat. Add slices of each straight to a warmed skillet with a bit of butter. Let your ingredients sizzle and brown before flipping. While it’s cooking, place a piece of cheese on top of one piece of bread. After both sides of bread and meat are cooked, smoosh the slices of toast together around the Spam. Open a can of peaches for dessert. Leave your dishes. Maybe on purpose.

Apply rouge and settle down to watch the latest wrestling match. It’s scripted, but you still love watching muscly men like Buddy Rogers duke it out in the ring. Take your first bite, savor it before your husband returns, blitzed and ready to argue about a woman's place.

- Danielle Dayney was born and raised in Ohio, and got her start writing rock concert reviews for a Toledo-based music magazine, The Glass Eye. Today, her work has appeared in the Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, online at Huffington Post, Dead Housekeeping and The Mindful Word, and in several anthologies. These days, you can find her chasing her kids and furbabies somewhere in the rolling hills of Virginia, or online at https://danielledayney.com. Her book is forthcoming from Brandylane Publishers in 2021.

Learn to Accessorize

Men are lovely adornments, Puddin’. They make life sexier, sweeter, richer sometimes. But you can have an outfit without the earrings and you can have a life without a man.

Change them like you change clothes. Let the men come and go. Swap them out like last year’s castoffs. Why make one permanent when having variety is so much more fun?

The 6’4” “yella” pseudo-thug? He isn’t going anywhere with his life and you don’t need to carry no man on your back.

The smooth talking singer with the Napoleon complex? He thinks his military service means he can treat you like a private to his General.

The one with the colored contacts? What were you thinking with that one, Pud?

The country boy with an accent that drips like melted butter? I know his grandmother was somebody special but he ain’t never seemed like much to me.

The one you married? You only needed him to bring your baby here.

There’s no man alive smart enough to tell you how to be a woman. And none worthy enough to stay with you while you figure it out, not even your husband.

I know you want to be a princess, Puddin’, but you don’t need a man to choose you.

You ain’t Cinderella. The shoe doesn’t fit. There’s better things to be than a princess and the best thing to be is – free.

The author, aged around 1, with her glamorous maternal grandmother, her “Geez”

-Toya R. Smith is a mother, a daughter, a sister, a Titi, a Black girl from West Baltimore. An Aborisha, a Blitch, a Conjurewoman. More than anything, she is a curator of joy.

Disassociation Dessert

Wait until the older kids are at school and the youngest is taking a nap with the bedroom door closed. Then make your chocolate sauce in secret. In the blender, add one half cup of sugar, one half cup of powdered milk, four tablespoons of cocoa, and four tablespoons and one teaspoon of hot water. Blend on high for thirty seconds. Scrape down the sides. Give it ninety seconds more at high speed.

The author’s industrious mother in her kitchen

Grab a spoon from the drawer and eat the whole batch of chocolate sauce sitting at the kitchen table. Don’t bother with a bowl, there are enough dishes to wash and laundry to fold. You should probably clean the bathroom too, but it can wait.

Each taste of the rich smooth chocolate melts it all away: your husband’s yelling, your kids’ demands, the complete lack of intellectual stimulation of being a housewife with four kids. You wanted this. You sigh and savor another bite.

Sometimes you mix this up on steamy summer nights to dollop over ice cream for the whole family, dessert for a dinner of popcorn when it is just too hot to cook.

Years later, when your younger daughter asks you for the recipe, stall her, make excuses, refuse to write it down. Finally relent and tell her what to write on the recipe card.

She will prepare it once for her children. Then she’ll file it away and never make it again.

- Margaret Shafer writes on two acres surrounded by cornfields in the Midwest. You can read her stories about life, her travels and general thoughts about the world at unfoldingfromthefog.wordpress.com.