Friday Night Pizza People

Uncle Johnny’s Tomato Pies shares a sidewalk with Shop-Rite. You can thank the archangels, the zoning board, and one Brooklyn expatriate. 

If you time it right, you can catch the pizza people. Save your food shopping for Friday night. Loiter in the car and receive gifts you did not know you needed. I know it has been a long week. I know you just want to buy your small-curd cottage cheese and triple-washed spinach and get home, where you are allowed to wear your ugly pants. 

But you need to see the coach who needs no permission. There he is, in polyester trousers with white stripes down the sides. All week he places balls on tees for small mammals with bad aim. His Thursday repast was wet Doritos in a dugout. He takes stray wiffles to the face and wipes the cheeks of other people’s grandchildren. If they are lucky, his Wee Vikes may come in third place this year. They will still get a trophy the size of Stonehenge. Tonight, he claims his medals, red and oily. If you know to ask, Uncle Johnny will give you triple pepperoni.

The coach holds the door for a couple whose cheese has slid off their cracker. Her compression socks and his cane are subterfuge. You are not supposed to know that they are eight years old, not eighty. But on Friday night, the illusion cannot hold. She is singing harmony with Dean Martin, whose “Volare” soaks the parking lot. He is laughing so hard he might drop something. That would be alright. They are young enough not to mind a little dust on their stromboli. 

Last Friday was their anniversary. They traded Uncle Johnny’s for the French place downtown. It seemed sophisticated. When they opened the menu, she saw something called a “Croque Monsieur.” She got the giggles. She took French way back, so she knows that twenty-four-dollar sandwich translates to “Mister Crunchy.” The waiter did not know. He tried not to laugh, being that this was a French place. He admitted they also serve a Croque Madame. That must mean Mister Crunchy is married. The couple has been laughing for a full week. The coach holds the door long enough to catch it. Mrs. Crunchy thanks him for his patience. He says it’s his pleasure.

There are many youths at Uncle Johnny’s. The girl with hair in her eyes is not on a date with the boy conducting a drum solo without sticks. He is a friend. He thinks it is sad that some girls mop their pizza with paper towels until the cheese is shriveled as jerky. What will they save, eight calories? He thinks everyone should be fat and free. The girl sweeps her hair straight back and looks like she has just emerged from the sea. Tonight, they will pick at crusts and make a pact to never stop feeling everything. She says the bravest people are “too sensitive.”

If you wait long enough, a pizza person will catch you. It may be the woman in the Dog Mom sweatshirt, with her single slice mummified in foil. It might be the father of five, wafting weary in a dust cloud of toddlers. It may even be Uncle Johnny, on a break from the brick oven to show the stars his bald head is anointed with oregano. Tonight, he will knead hundreds of benedictions. He stretches dough until it becomes breathing room. Life returns to lungs and bodies. They will meet your eye, glad to be caught with their hands full. 

The liturgy must go on. A toddler breaks free from the cloud. He has spotted the striped pants. He throws his fullness into the coach’s body, embracing his knees like pillars. The coach staggers into Mr. Crunchy, whose cane bears both of their weight. Dean Martin is still singing. Volare, fly. The boy without sticks stops drumming to make sure the mermaid catches everything. 

ANGELA TOWNSEND (she/her) is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, seven-time Best of the Net nominee, and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review's 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Epiphany, Five Points, Indiana Review, The Normal School, Redivider, SmokeLong Quarterly, Terrain, Under the Sun, and World Literature Today, among others. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College and works for a cat sanctuary.