by Alison Morretta

I turned my husband into a chair once. It was a Tuesday. I’d made meatloaf. He was displeased with the size of the onions, which is the kind of thing you say when it’s not about the onions at all.

I don’t cry when I chop onions. This also bothered my husband. He thought there was something monstrous in it. “It’s not normal,” he said. “It’s inhuman.”

I thought it more inhuman to want someone to cry for no reason, but avoidance is an art form, so I said, “It’s genetic.”

There’s zero science to back that up. There is no explanation for me.

My husband was always turning nothings into somethings—a magician pulling a rabid, red-eyed bunny from a top hat of resentment. But that’s not real magic; it’s deceit dressed up as sorcery. Magicians are just professional liars who cut women in half and call it entertainment. I told my husband that, and he said it wasn’t funny.

I said, “It’s not meant to be.”

Flinching is a learned response. I learned it early—earlier than I learned how to make my mother’s meatloaf, which was also her mother’s meatloaf, and so on. I was nothing but the latest link in an ancestral chain of mothers making meatloaves and chopping onions a particular way. But I will not be a mother. The matrilineal meat market is closed. My husband thought I should feel bad about that, too.

“Cut the onions smaller next time. I don’t like them chunky.”

“They’ve been chopping them like this since the old country.”

“And we’re in Scarsdale. I’m tired, and I want to watch the Sox lose.”

He dumped his plate in the sink without scraping it clean first. We’d talked about this. A few pieces of onion tumbled into the basin and I floated up out of my body. Perched on the ceiling fan, I watched myself have the same conversation I’d been having since the first mother crawled out of the primordial soup and started making meatloaf. Or maybe even earlier than that, when we were stars and not stardust.

There was something in the air on that particular Tuesday: something layered under the scent of roasted beef and too-large onions. A metallic tang—angry, but not in the way the smell of fresh blood is angry. I inhaled it and returned to myself: still me, but somehow different.

Evolved.

I grabbed his dish from the sink. The offending onions and the gravy streaks formed a 3-D Rorschach of my husband’s face. I looked from his garbage face to his real one and saw the same contempt. The marriage counselor’s voice came into my head unbidden.

“And how does that make you feel?”

I smashed the plate on the floor, on that checkerboard tile we fought over at Home Depot. I picked up the biggest shard—the one that held my husband’s teeth.

“What are you gonna do? Stab me?”

I couldn’t think of a more perfect time to stab someone, but that’s not what it was for. Because I knew then what the metallic, not-blood smell was: a call to action. A sacrifice was required. I sliced my palm open and curled my hand into a fist, letting my life essence fall in fat crimson drops onto what used to be a dinner plate. I told my husband he was as useless as a broken chair.

A La-Z-Boy appeared in my kitchen: a recliner that did not recline, its fabric ripped in several places on the seat cushion. It was a forgettable shade of beige and smelled of fifteen years of farts. I’d never seen a sadder, more worthless chair, and I realized: it’s me.

I’m the one who’s magic.

Alison Morretta received a BA in English and Creative Writing from Kenyon College. She has authored sixteen nonfiction books for middle and high school students. Alison’s fiction has been published in The First Line, Black Sheep, and Blood & Bourbon, and she placed second in the 2025 Flash Frog flash fiction contest. She is currently working on her first novel.