(Inheritance No. 4) (2026)
Updated: 6 days ago
Yesterday for lunch
I made a sandwich:
Ham, Swiss, lettuce,
and Hellmann's on rye.
I couldn't wait to eat it.
An elderly woman with oversized glasses
asked what I meant by the mayo.
I just like mayonnaise, I told her.
"Be quiet," she said.
"Forever."
I flinched.
She yanked her cardigan tight around her
and rolled away a stroller
with a Pekingese in it.
Someone else approached me.
He was a Slovenian philosopher who'd
written extensively
on film and the politics of bread.
"The rye--" he said,
"it invokes the agrarian imaginary,
perhaps ǔrban pastoralism,
while the ham
suggests a violence
the artist refuses to name."
I said it wasn't for sale.
He nodded and chuckled,
his untucked belly dancing.
"Bully. To hell with capitalism."
He then delivered a ricocheting
lecture on Anglo-Saxon toiletscz.
A woman from some public ivy
asked whether my sandwich
was autobiographical.
I said my grandma used to make them.
She teared up.
I said she put a pickle and butter between
two slices of Wonderbread. That's
what she fed us.
She began to cry.
It wasn’t that bad, I said.
Someone photographed the sandwich.
Someone photographed the photograph
of the photograph.
Someone penned a dissertation
on the distance between the photographs.
By 3pm, the sandwich
had a title:
(Inheritance No. 4)
A curator displayed it
between a TV with fuzz on it
and a bowl of artificial fruit.
I tapped her and asked
whether I could
maybe
have a bite first.
"The work," she explained,
"belongs to whom?"
I had paid for the ingredients.
"And that's the problem."
A critic published a review
calling the absence of tomato
feminist.
Another argued that the sandwich
didn't exist at all:
it was merely a site
where hunger performed itself.
I was getting hungry.
They moved the thing
behind a pane of glass.
The placard explained
that the artist's desire to consume it
was itself a critique
of the commodification of desire.
I had not said this.
That didn't matter.
By Friday,
the ham was green.
Furry.
The museum called it
a radical intervention
in the temporality of decay.
The smell was described
as participatory.
A child came in,
asked his father
why nobody had eaten it.
His father explained
sandwiches are complicated.
The kid stuck a wet Now
and Later on the glass.
The museum hired him
as a consultant.
At the opening reception,
I stood beside my sandwich
holding a Dixie plate
with some coleslaw on it.
Nobody recognized me.
Some art lady asked
what I thought the work meant.
I said
it was about me being hungry.
She smiled politely at my interpretation.
She downed a canapé.
I watched her chew
as nobody asked her
what it meant.
Stay hungry 🫡
