[audioplayer file=”https://admin.rattle.com/audio/SuntupOil.mp3″]
Paul Suntup
OLIVE OIL
The toast would taste better with egg, but there aren’t any,
so I pour a thimble-sized serving of olive oil on, to make it more
flavorful. I like the taste of olive oil. It reminds me of the time
when I was eighteen and jumped clear over the hood of my car
because I could. To be more specific, olive oil is the part where
I leave the ground and I’m in the air, halfway across. Right then,
before landing on the other side. That’s the taste of olive oil.
It also tastes the way Madagascar sounds when you say it
backwards. If there were olive oil cologne, I would wear it and if
there were olive oil goldfish, I would have two in a bowl on the
table. For some reason, it is also a man swallowing lighter
fluid because the pain in his belly is bigger than the Kalahari
Desert. But maybe that’s only when you drink it straight; and
sometimes it tastes like Brigitte Bardot. To be more specific,
in the scene where she is sunning naked in Capri, an impossibly
blue ocean wrestling with the sky in the distance.
—from Rattle #21, Summer 2004