Couple’s Disagreement by Lucas Liu

I had been rather fond of myself at first. I was sure to myself that I was right, but she was not. And when time went on, she had just kept pushing.

“I had decided on the salad,” she had said, bickering.

I put my fork down. I had decided to get the salad many times, so I wasn’t quite sure why she had kept bickering.

The food hadn’t tasted right. She hadn’t tasted right either, the smell of vinegar had crept up to my lips as she had taken another bite. I had tasted her too, and in her fine lips of red wine, stained teeth and midnights, she had tasted just the same as I had known her, always persimmon, a flash of hue and she was gone.

She had left the salad uneaten. So I would eat it too, eating it for her, sure that she had been mistaken in her choices for what to order. She could’ve ordered anything. The lemon with the steak. The salmon with the shrimp. And so she had ordered the salad, instead of all things, and so I fussed with her.

Out, of her tremendous garnet mouth was the shape of you, just hard to barely make out, and in the shadowy copse, I could see my face in her uvula, a shadowy reflection of you.

I put my fork down.

“Couldn’t you take more time to eat?” She asked, and I poked and prodded at myself with a cotton bud.

She had been unimportant, and I even less.

The two of us had gone on no more sorry date since 2007. Her and I, she and I, had left since the 2000s, gone into another sorry dimension.

But I just could not shake the fact, the mere fact, that she had stuck beside me the entire time, throughout our adventures.

She gnashed her teeth.

In them there was pomegranate, from the salad of another meal. She was sure of herself this time around and I watched her gnash, and out popped a pomegranate seed, filling my nose with the scent of acrid, and in me she had taken on a kiss, and I just couldn’t stand it.

“Look at me,” she had said.

I did not look, had my eyes closed at first.

I opened them and she was everywhere, kaleidoscope, the full of it a haunted mirror, many refractions and it was all her, and I could touch her but I could not, there she was again, bearing fruit.

I grabbed one from her. It was pomegranate.

“Where had you gotten this one from?” I said earlier.

“Just earlier today,” she had said.

I took one seed out and popped it in my teeth. It was cherry. It would bleed.

Sours and fringes afterward, the ghosts of whiskey afterward, a slide and a slip-slide and oh there it was you, a familiar face of you, and out in the wilderness we would walk, smelling trees.

“This one was birch,” she’d said.

But I was not paying attention. I was looking at me, and all my sorrows, in here I had come with her, and in me, I would leave.

But I could not protest to go, and the two of us would sat, eating all our dinners. She would look out at me with all these teeth. Eyes made of teeth, legs made of teeth, mouth made of teeth.

A calm night rise. Starry moonlight. Nothing but the sound of ocean breeze. It was hot, but not too hot, but then it was stifling.

In me, I was proud of her.

Lucas Liu (she/her) is a Canadian writer from Scarborough. She has published in Stone of Madness, Pfudalmda, Routledge, and Psychology Today. Her BlueSky is @ideaswithluke and her website is www.ideas-with-luke.com.

6 March 2026