Omelet

Daniel Groves

Omelet

It was all too much. He simply could not do it.

“You have to fold it over, Daddy.”

“I know, Pumpkin. Daddy just isn’t very good at this kind of thing.”

He’d never been. He and Sarah always kept the labor divided equally, each doing what they were good at, not intruding on each other’s work. Maybe it was old-fashioned, but it worked for them.

“Daddy, what’s that smell?” asked Lucy.

She stood on her tiptoes, pulling herself up just high enough to see over the edge of the counter. He looked down, saw her dirty bare feet, and decided she got that kind of curiosity from her mother. Sarah always was the explorer.

“What’s that smell?” Lucy asked again.

“Oh, geez,” he said, shaking the pan. “Go sit down.”

Lucy walked to the table and climbed into the chair. She swung her feet back and forth, waiting as a fisherman does for the line to flinch.

He picked up the skillet and turned off the heat. When he tried to dump the omelet onto the plate, it stuck to the pan. They never stuck when Sarah made them, but now it seemed that all their frying pans were doomed to have little specks of burnt eggs glued to them for eternity.

He bit the big knuckle of his pointer finger to keep down the emotion.

“Here you go,” he croaked, sliding the plate onto the table in front of his daughter.

She looked at the food then up at him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“No fork?”

—

Daniel Groves (he/him) is a writer from Ohio and an MFA candidate at Concordia University–Saint Paul. He won the 2022 and 2023 Massillon Public Library Poetry Contests and is working on a novel. When not writing, he masquerades as an event planner who enjoys reading, F1, theater, and film. He’s @The_Grovenator on X.