Hot Lunch Petition

A hungry kindergartner came to the cafeteria worker, Macy Dolan, crying because she couldn’t pay for her school lunch. Macy did what any cafeteria worker with a heart would do. She drove to the kindergartner’s house and used a frozen pepperoni pizza to beat up the kindergartner’s mother, who claimed the child should eat for free.

Unfortunately, the elementary school where Macy was employed has a policy against giving students free food. According to protocol, the situation is handled in this manner: The first three times a student is unable to pay, the lunch is taken to the bathroom by a cafeteria worker and flushed down the toilet before the child’s eyes. The fourth time, the school provides a hat shaped like a cheese sandwich and milk.

Macy had seen the ridicule these children endure when their peers witness them wearing that cheese on a bun. She also saw these children’s energy wane because they weren’t being nutritionally sustained by flushed lunches. But what really bothered her was the way soggy pizzas began backing up toilets in the school restrooms. The melted cheese on the toilet rims, along with the pepperoni and tomato sauce swirling, pushed her too far.

Near cafeteria trash cans overflowing with squandered food, poor children huffed fumes of hot lunches the rich kids threw away. Soon, even rich kids began huffing hot lunches from the trash as they learned the fumes could get them high.

Unfortunately, we live in a country where rich kids are “kids” and poor kids are not “kids” but “children.” We live in a country where food is flushed away by adults or trashed in stinking heaps by rich kids while poor children go hungry. Just to get by, poor children have to invent new ways for rich kids to get high. But everyone, rich or poor, has one thing in common, and that is the need for toilets.

That is why Macy Dolan uses food as a weapon, wielding a frozen pizza at the faces of the parents of hungry children. Now that she has been fired, she is calling on the School District to reinstate her for saving toilets sacrificed to childhood hunger.

A person who cares this much about toilets belongs in our schools.

Aimee Parkison has published eight books and won FC2’s Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize and North American Review’s Kurt Vonnegut Prize. She is Professor of Fiction Writing at OSU. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Puerto Del Sol, Five Points, and Best Small Fictions. www.aimeeparkison.com