Chili Night by Gwen E. Kirby

Her husband Kevin had made a pot of inedible chili and Megan was livid. She had told him not to deviate from the recipe she’d perfected: chili powder and chili flakes, diced bell peppers, ground beef seared in a hot pan, black beans made in the pressure cooker, not taken from a can. There was an order to it all, a dance. It was not a recipe you could simply “throw together in the Instapot,” though that was what Kevin had done, and at that point why bother cooking at all? Why not order food from the Indian place with the golden samosas or the pizza place that was mediocre but so fast it had to be magic. In their twenties, they had tried to beat that magic, had placed pizza orders so bizarre that they simply could not have been prepared in advance. Pineapple and olives and anchovies, disgusting combinations that they ate and marveled at. Only fifteen minutes! They had stopped ordering those pizzas after Abigail was born, a fat unhappy baby whose crying, she believed, had driven Kevin to cheat, though he swore it had never happened, that his coworker Cynthia was just a good friend. And who could say what had happened those first two years? Or the next three, with a baby and a toddler? If the pizza arrived quickly, she perceived it as arriving in the blink of an eye and at the pace of a snail, time having broken down into a carousel of slides: baby on the floor, baby in the crib, toddler in the playpen, baby crying loudly, baby covered in shit, and where the fuck was Kevin? Kevin who said, “Abigail only wants you to put her to bed,” which of course Abigail did, she was used to Megan doing it. Kevin, who the kids thought was a good dad because kids didn’t know any better, because they thought some grown man having fun with them was as important as her doing their laundry. And now Abigail and Noah were eight and six and they liked the chili the way she made it because she had coaxed them into it, small bite by small bite, exposed them to the beans until they were familiar beans, the beef familiar beef, the shredded cheese at the center of the table a topping that hid all flaws so she added it before the kids sat down. All of that ground work and Kevin had put pinto beans into the chili instead of black ones, unsightly pale grubs, and Abigail was holding one on her tongue and showing it to Megan, look Mom it’s weird, and Noah, who had not been alerted to the chili’s weirdness before, was gazing at his bowl of chili like it had betrayed him and Kevin said, it’s something new, you just have to try it!, and then Abigail was declaring the chili “gross” and spitting the pinto bean back into her bowl, obscene with spit atop the mound of shredded cheese, and Kevin was upset and telling Abigail that she would sit there until she had eaten every bite of chili in her bowl and Noah was silent but stressed, his eyes wide as he tried to guess whether he would share his sister’s punishment. This wasn’t how they had agreed they would parent, this was a story that they had told about their own childhoods, their own angry mothers and fathers. Kevin stared at his own bowl, his face tight and flushed, and then pushed back from the table and left the living room. Megan heard the bedroom door slam. Megan said, “pass me your bowl,” and Abigail did, and Megan made a show of taking the biggest spoonful she could from Abigail’s bowl and stuffing it into her mouth. She chewed with her mouth open and Abigail and Noah laughed. Megan did it again. Abigail’s tears were gone and Noah was smiling and Megan took an even bigger spoonful and dropped it, plop, on her paper towel napkin, it did look disgusting like that, and she took it to the trashcan and held her finger to her lips as she opened the lid and dropped the napkin inside. Megan knew she was undermining Kevin, but didn’t he deserve that? The kids were upset and he was gone.

When Kevin came back to the table, he looked calmer and so tired, his hair straight and wild with winter static. He took a deep breath and turned to Abigail. He was sorry he’d gotten mad at her. He had worked hard making the chili, so he was sad when she didn’t like it, but that

didn’t mean it was okay to lose his temper. Abigail didn’t have to eat it if she didn’t want to. Abigail looked at Kevin, her face the same as Megan had seen it a thousand times since Abby had been born, arrested between a smile or a cry, unsure even in those final moments which

direction her mood would turn. She looked at Megan as if to say, should I tell Dad about the scoops of chili? Should I tell Dad I’m sorry? Should you? And there was no way she was

apologizing to Kevin or telling him what she had done, such a small thing anyway that Abby would one day understand. Instead Megan said, why don’t you give your dad a hug? and Abby stood but Megan could see the guilt on her daughter’s face, the weight of the secret between them that kept Kevin outside their circle of three, apart even as they hugged each other, even as chatter restarted and the children slowly relaxed while Megan took another bite of chili, the texture all wrong on her tongue.

Gwen E. Kirby is the author of the collection Shit Cassandra Saw. Her stories appear in One Story, Tin House, Guernica, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Johns Hopkins, a PhD from the University of Cincinnati, and teaches creative writing and literature at Carleton College.

3 October 2025