@emilyseatingtacos

Thursday, September 10, 2026

Breakfast

Sno’ Witty™ woke up with one objective.

Pack.

She ate half a sleeve of saltines over the kitchen sink so the crumbs fell directly down the drain, then stared at an open duffel bag on the floor.

She did not pack.

This was unfortunate because at 8:30 tomorrow morning she was contractually obligated by marriage and social decency to get into a four-wheel-drive vehicle and participate in a five-hour road trip to hell.

She used to love road trips. Back when youth absorbed vibration.

Now she likes home trips.

A home trip is where you stay inside your own perimeter for six consecutive days, do not wear hard pants, and consume zero items that were kept warm under a heat lamp next to lottery scratch-offs.

Some people sleep on home trips.

Sno’ Witty™ has read about sleep in magazines. It sounds lovely.

She packed Bane.

He is eighty pounds of velvet, bad hips, and deep suspicion.

She put him back.

He collapsed onto the bath mat with a long, wet sigh that sounded like an old radiator dying in February.

He knows.

Lunch

Lunch was three slices of oven-roasted turkey eaten directly out of the plastic tub in the cold glow of the open refrigerator, followed by a cheese stick of indeterminate vintage found behind the mustard.

On the counter, the small TV was covering civilization.

Civilization was not doing well.

The news anchor reported that politicians were now essentially proposing direct cash handouts to convince people to show up to the polls.

Sno’ Witty™ chewed the cheese stick.

Honestly? Fair.

People are always demanding that leaders understand the economy. What is more American than cutting out the middleman and buying a vote like a scratch-off ticket at a Cenex station?

She briefly calculated her worth on the open political market.

Between her checking balance, a half-charged phone, and a burning resentment toward two-lane bypasses, she figured she was worth about forty-two dollars and a bag of salted nut rolls.

She’d take thirty-five if they let her stay on the couch.

Still not packed.

Dinner

Dinner was cold soup out of the can because running the dishwasher felt like committing to a future she wasn’t prepared to finance.

Travis was excited for the five-hour drive to hell.

This was difficult, because unbridled male optimism in an enclosed kitchen is deafening when your soul is running on three percent battery.

Travis was currently cleaning loose-leaf paper.

Sno’ Witty™ watched him from across the laminate island.

The lined paper was fresh out of the plastic shrink-wrap. It was clean. It had committed no crimes.

He was wiping each sheet with a microfiber cloth and squaring the edges against the countertop with crisp, rhythmic taps.

Tap. Tap. Slide.

Like a small-town county clerk preparing evidence for a 1984 zoning dispute.

He said, “If we leave at 7:15, we miss the bottleneck before the river.”

Sno’ Witty™ did not blink.

“The bottleneck is the road, Travis. The road is the bottleneck.”

“Just gotta stay ahead of the campers,” he said, tapping the ream.

He has systems.

Sno’ Witty™ has a notebook.

She sat down, uncapped a ballpoint pen, and wrote at the top of the page:

PACKING LIST

Then, without consulting her conscious mind, her hand wrote:

• own forty acres surrounded by cedar trees
• go to Montana and never explain why
• have cash in a mason jar
• sleep for nine uninterrupted hours without waking up to wonder if the stove is on
• stop moving
• eat a vegetable that didn’t come out of a plastic clamshell
• remain within one zip code until the ground freezes
• become legally unavailable to Interstate 94

She looked down at the paper.

This was not a packing list.

This was an escape plan masquerading as a bucket list.

Worse, it expired in roughly ten hours.

Beneath it, she scrawled:

• two pairs of socks (check for holes)
• phone charger
• Ibuprofen (the big bottle)

She crossed out good attitude.

Too bulky. Wouldn’t fit in the side pocket anyway.

Travis tapped his stack one final time, satisfied that the paper had been thoroughly disciplined.

Bane let out another low radiator groan from under the table.

Outside, five hundred miles of cracked concrete and orange barrels waited in the dark like an unavoidable appointment.

Sno’ Witty™ closed the notebook, swallowed two antacids, and decided this counted as preparation.

Technically, it was organized failure.

Good enough for the Midwest.