Day 3 Winner of Quarto’s 2024 Thunderdome Flash Fiction Contest. View the prompt here.

Illustration by Jacqueline Subkhanberdina

The prosciutto is too warm.
Your dad’s under the ground and this is all you can think: the prosciutto is too warm. When your uncle put a bit on your plate, your finger brushed it, and it was much too warm. Blazing. But what can one do about a thing like that? Sometimes, the prosciutto is too warm.
But it’s still true, like lots of things are true. Like the truth that your mother is remarrying your uncle. Your father’s brother, just to be clear. Yeah, you’re from Alabama, but not like that. The prosciutto is too warm, and your mom is remarrying your uncle, and your grandma is crying and blathering in the corner, and she keeps grabbing your face, turning it this way and that, saying how much like your dad you look, how very much your eyes resemble his, how he was born at 9:12 am, isn’t that something that she still remembers, 9:12 am? And the suit you’re wearing is tight in the armpits. And the prosciutto, on its plastic platter at your uncle’s house, grows warmer by the second. And the Birmingham cemetery they lower him into pays its workers 7.20 hourly, so you can’t really blame them when they drag the shovels up to the graveside while the minister is still finishing the sermon. Amen, Hallelujah, all that.
Later, you will sit criss-cross on the ground next to your mother’s rocking chair, with prosciutto still on your too-thin, dixie ultra plate, and she will say nothing, so much nothing, so much nothing, until she will turn to you, and open her mouth, and what comes out will not be the answer, will never be the answer, will be only:
“Baby, look alive. Your ham is gettin cold.”