Sunday Breakfast by Charles Michael Fischer

Cooking your own breakfast is a big deal in a mental hospital. I was fifteen and would be discharged from Dorothea Dix in Raleigh, NC at the end of the school year. I lived in Ashby, the unlocked adolescent ward. I’d lived in Williams, the short term locked ward, and Cherry, the long term locked ward, before moving to Ashby.

Eggs, butter, cheese, bacon, country sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, and orange juice were delivered to the downstairs kitchen at Sunday’s dawn. My room was above the kitchen. Saturday nights, I slept with my clock radio playing baseball or AM talk, usually a trucker’s show. Drivers in Iowa or Illinois discussed road life with a gravelly-voiced host sipping black coffee. Sometimes, I stared through my wire mesh window at downtown lights, constellations, and the moon.

I was an omelet guy. I’d perfected the flip. My omelets were fluffy works of art. Cheese oozed onto the flowered Dixie plate with tomato and mushroom bits. I became good at something. I practiced and marked time to Sunday Breakfast. I dreamt in a hospital where patients once worked a self-sustaining farm, where Sherman inspected the wards and seized the grounds for encampment, where I carried my plate and juice upstairs surrounded by ghosts. The world is still wondrous when you’re committed.

Charles Michael Fischer‘s work has appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal, Phoebe, The Rumpus, Green Mountains Review, Natural Bridge, and several other places. He lives near Savannah, GA and teaches at Georgia Southern University.