I Sat In The Car To Eat

I sat in the car to eat.
I grabbed my phone and placed it in my daughter’s Hello Kitty phone holder.
I took a deep breath and turned on the camera.
It was the first time. It felt strange. I had no table, no utensils. Only my hands.
But I could do it. I had nothing to lose.
That afternoon I tried to become the most infamous gastronomic garbage man on the internet and in Recreo.

In a Cordiez supermarket bag I gathered all the leftover food from my bachelor fridge and left it on the passenger seat. The bag smelled bad.
The food smelled bad.
The summer heat didn’t help, the car’s air conditioner was broken, and the flies…oh yes.
Lately around that time I was suffering from severe depression.
I bought food and shoved it into the fridge without taking a bite.
And it went on for many days…
Sometimes there were scheduled power cuts. Two, three, four…ten hours. The damn mayor always managed to save energy.
And I was skinny, with big black circles under my eyes like a panda, only red wine in my stomach, Camel cigarettes in my mouth. I had been fired from my job. My wife no longer loved me. We were separated, and she didn’t apologize when she left with my daughter to live with her parents in Tucumán. It was a hard season.
My psychiatrist told me to try to find a hobby. There were two options: a hobby or suicide.
I was still too sad to invent something new. I had never invented anything, but it was part of the plan to recover my autonomy.
I felt responsible for my own well‑being.
I couldn’t remember the last time I had lunch. And I was starting to feel hungry.

The food was there. Dry chicken, salads, meat empanadas, rice stew, potato omelet, breaded cutlets, fried egg, clumped spaghetti.
Too much old food. But my only food.
I had no money. It was the end of the month and I had no savings.
"For hunger, no bread is too hard," and I was lucky.
I opened a TikTok account because my daughter, when her mother didn’t pay attention to her, watched TikTok. She might look at me again if the video reached her.
The camera started filming.
I took a deep breath.
And said:
"Hello friends, today I’ll eat for you."
The words were clumsy.
I showed the open bag with the food.
And with my right hand I pulled out some rice mixed with sauce and salad.
I gagged a little. Started salivating.
My stomach growled.
And I brought the bite to my mouth.
And I ate.
The flavor penetrated my taste buds, the bitter saliva, the salty, the spicy, the dryness of the grain, the roughness of the lettuce, the intensity of the red sauce, the darts of ground beef, the curd filling my palate with bombs.
I chewed slowly, looking at the camera, tears in my eyes.
And I swallowed.
The food dropped like an anvil into my belly.
I checked the time…
Three minutes.
And I vomited.
I vomited in the car, on the phone, on my clothes.
I stopped the recording.
And holding the phone in one hand, sweating, I posted the video without looking at the result.
I opened the car doors.
And lay down on the seat.
It wasn’t what I had imagined, but it was honest. It was all that was left of me in that moment.
I thought of my ex‑wife, my teenage daughter, and my former coworkers at Tejica watching the video.

And I began to laugh.

BIO: Maximiliano Guzmán is an author from Recreo, Catamarca in Argentina. His work has been in Expat Press, HAD, Don't submit, Midcult, A Thin Slice of Anxiety and more! You can find him at https://madmaxguzman.neocities.org

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