Cold Dinner

“Sometimes dinner’s not about food—it’s about pretending the world isn’t falling apart in the chair next to you.”

After the phone call outside, Mum came back in ten minutes later with two pies in a brown paper bag, the bottom of it spotted with grease like it had been crying. The warmth of the food had soaked through in dark patches, and the scent hit before she even closed the door—cheap pastry, meat that smelled more like memory than substance.

She didn’t say where she’d been. Didn’t mention the call. Just stepped back into the room like she hadn’t left at all, like there wasn’t a world outside the door she’d been speaking to in a voice we weren’t meant to hear.

The door swung shut behind her with a hollow thud. She dropped the bag onto the table between the beds, the brown laminate surface wobbling under the weight like it wasn't used to doing much anymore. Then she kicked off her shoes—hard. One hit the wall and bounced, the other spun out and came to rest near the bathroom door, flopped on its side like it had given up.

Without a word, she dropped into the plastic chair and folded in on herself. Cardigan pulled tight, knees pressed close. Her hands worked at the fraying wool, fingers moving fast and automatic like they were trying to remember something old and forgotten. Her eyes were fixed on the wall—just the wall. But she was staring through it, like she could see past the faded paint and cheap plasterboard into a future she didn’t want to look at.

The yellow ceiling light buzzed above us, throwing her shadow long and crooked across the carpet, stretching toward the door like it might try to slip away on its own.

No one spoke.

The silence wasn’t awkward. It wasn’t angry. It was just… there.

Mack reached for the bag first, the paper crinkling loudly. He pulled out one of the pies and examined it like it might be hiding something. It was round and slightly caved in, the top crust flaking around the edges like it had been left under a heat lamp too long. He didn’t comment, just unwrapped it slowly and took a small bite.

I waited a few seconds longer—because I always did—then took the second one. Beef and onion. Same as always. The pastry came away in thin, greasy shards that stuck to my fingers and the front of my jumper. It was warm, just, but the filling was gluey, a kind of brown that didn’t occur in nature, and smelled more like salt and flour than anything that had ever grazed in a field.

Still, it was food. And food meant we were still trying.

I took small bites and chewed slowly. The texture was oddly comforting—crumbly and too cold in the middle, but familiar. It felt like a thing people did when they weren’t falling apart.

Across from me, Mack was dismantling his pie. Not eating it so much as dissecting it, picking off the crust in fragments and lining them up on the bedspread in a neat row. He’d done that since we were little. He used to say it helped him concentrate, though on what, I never quite knew. He didn’t look at me, didn’t look at Mum. Just worked silently, like he was solving a puzzle only he could see.

The TV was still on, muted now. It cast a cold blue light over us, soft and constant, like moonlight filtered through water. Some cooking show from earlier. A man with slicked-back hair flipping pancakes too perfectly. The subtitles were out of sync, trailing behind by a full sentence, like the television couldn’t quite keep up with reality either.

The light above us flickered again, slow and irregular, just enough to make the shadows shift slightly with each pulse. The kind of flicker that made your eyes tired and your brain a little uncertain—like maybe nothing was solid, and everything could just… change.

Outside, night had truly taken hold. The darkness had settled deep and wide across the car park and beyond, muffling the edges of things. The dog that barked once earlier barked again—sharper now, one quick yelp like a warning. Then silence.

Mum still hadn’t moved.

The pie bag sat crumpled between us, one corner of it touching the laminate table and leaving behind a dark, greasy print. The smell was overpowering now—pastry and meat and something faintly metallic, like coins in the bottom of a hot car.

I shifted closer to the bedhead, curling my toes under the blanket wall Mack had made earlier. It sagged a little now, one corner collapsed, but it still felt like a fort. Still felt like protection.

Ribbons sat beside me, half-tucked under the sheet, her eyes catching the TV’s glow every few seconds. Watching the room. Watching us.

No one asked if we were okay.

But we were still here. Still eating. Still breathing in the silence.

I finished half my pie, then folded the rest carefully back into the brown paper, smoothing the corners as if that might make it taste better later. I slipped it under the corner of the wobbly table, where the grease immediately began to bleed through and stain the carpet—a slow, dark bloom that spread outwards like a secret you couldn’t take back.

I wasn’t full. Not really. But I wasn’t hungry either. I felt full of everything else—of dust, and silence, and the kind of tired that doesn't go away with sleep. Full of questions I wasn’t allowed to ask and answers I didn’t want. Full of the strange woman’s words at reception. Before it really starts.

I pulled my backpack across the bed. It had been zipped up in a rush—Mum’s kind of rush, all speed and no precision. One of the straps was caught around a half-empty packet of wipes, and the front pocket had a sock sticking out of it like a white flag. I unzipped it and dug through until I found my notebook and the stubby pencil I always kept tucked into the spiral binding. The pages had gone a bit bent at the corners, dog-eared by accident. That annoyed me. I liked clean pages.

I flipped past the older drawings—Grandma’s kitchen, her too-loud clock stuck at ten past three in orange crayon. A page of doodles I’d done in the back seat, all dust clouds and squiggly emus.

Then a blank page.

It felt like a relief.

A clean place.

Somewhere to put all the chaos.

I started with the motel room. The bed came first—two lumpy rectangles for the mattresses, rumpled lines for the covers. I added the little table with its bent leg and the overhead light that always flickered one second too late, as if it needed convincing every time it was asked to shine. Then the TV—tiny and square with antennae that reached out like insect feelers, trying to understand the world around them. I drew the window, too, and the heavy curtains like tired eyelids trying to stay shut.

Then I drew Mum, slumped in the plastic chair like she’d melted there. I gave her big spiral eyes and her cardigan bunched around her shoulders like a cocoon. Her mouth was a straight line. I didn’t know how else to draw the kind of tired that had no shape.

Mack came next.

He was easy.

I gave him a blanket-cape and a sharp frown, his arms crossed as he stood guard by the door. I made him tall, taller than in real life, with serious eyes and a determined squiggle of a mouth. I added a speech bubble for fun: “Fear not, citizens.” It made me smile.

Then I got to me.

And stopped.

The pencil hovered above the page.

I didn’t know who I was supposed to be right now. The girl who was scared? The one trying not to be? The girl who saw a empty-eyed man step through a wall, or the one who was just tired and wanted to go home and didn’t know where that was anymore?

In the end, I drew myself sitting on the bed with Ribbons, but I left my face blank. Just a round circle. A nothing. No eyes, no mouth. Just the bow in my hair—big and lopsided, always too close to falling off.

I stared at the page.

It stared back.

A question with no answer.

Then something in my chest twisted, hard, and I crushed the paper in my hand before I could stop myself. One fast, angry movement. It crackled loudly in the quiet room, sharp and jagged. Mack looked up, surprised, his mouth opening slightly like he wanted to say something. But he didn’t.

The pencil rolled off the bed and vanished beneath it with a soft thud. I didn’t reach for it. I shoved the crumpled drawing deep into the motel bin, the thin metal sides clanging faintly like a bell.

Then I lay down.

I turned my face into the pillow and tried to make myself as small as I could. The fabric was scratchy, like paper towel, and smelled faintly of shampoo that wasn’t mine—cheap and sharp and floral, like pretending to be something gentle. The scent clung to my skin.

Ribbons sat at my side, one arm bent at the wrong angle again. I adjusted her so she looked up at the ceiling, her button eyes reflecting the flicker of the lightbulb, tiny constellations in the gloom. She didn’t mind that I hadn’t drawn her. She was already part of everything.

Across the room, Mum sighed.

A long, tired sound, like she was letting something out she'd been holding too long. Her phone landed on the bedside table with a careful clack. Her feet padded across the carpet, then the bathroom door clicked shut behind her. A second later, the tap sputtered to life, its gurgling echo filling the pipes like old voices murmuring in the walls.

Outside, headlights swept past.

For a moment the curtains glowed gold—just for a heartbeat—before the dark folded back around them like a blanket being pulled tight. Doors slammed, footsteps whispered by. Strangers we would never meet. Stories that would never touch ours.

I pressed deeper into the pillow, trying to disappear into the folds. Trying to fall through the bed into somewhere else.

Somewhere easier.

But the room wouldn't let me go.

The light flickered.

The air smelt like pies and fear.

And the blank face in my sketchbook still hovered behind my eyelids, waiting for me to finish it.

Waiting for me to decide who I was supposed to be.