One Bite by Sydney Koeplin
Managing Editor Frankie Spring on today’s short-short: Sydney Koeplin’s “One Bite” is both appropriately and deceptively named. At exactly 100 words, this micro piece is indeed bite-sized, but its meager word count conceals layers of surprise. The narrator appears at first to be telling a story of refusal: only one bite of food. But as is often the case with such refusal (from diet to eating disorder to hunger strike), the narrator’s self-imposed hunger blurs the border between passivity and action. Is refusal an act of withdrawal, or a bid to seize control? As the story’s cravings grow, restraint and excess meet in consumptive images: the narrator shrivels, but the whole world looks like a feast. In the end, does the earth shrink to the circumference of a cherry, or does the cherry swell large as a planet? Perhaps a bite of each.
One Bite
Mama always said that anything is okay in moderation, so now I take just one bite of everything. Ribeye, Caesar salad, baked potato. Caramel chew. My thighs stay skinny. My tummy stays flat. Mama stays proud. I can eat my way around the world like this. Texas toast, Wiener schnitzel, baked Alaska. All washed down with a sip of French 75. My hair falls out, my nails grow brittle. I watch the seasons change from the high window. I want to take a bite out of the Earth. I want to pop the globe like a cherry between my teeth.
Sydney Koeplin is a writer and editor from northern Illinois. She is an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University and the fiction editor of the Mid-American Review. Her work is published or forthcoming in Moon City Review, Tiny Molecules, Hypertext Review, and elsewhere. You can read more of her writing at sydneykoeplin.com.
