In the town where I live, at its annual fair, the longest line leads to the booth where my father sells brain sandwiches. All of the sandwiches, this year, are made with pigs’ brains because mad cow rumors scared off so many customers last summer. I’m twenty-one, but it’s my tenth year of helping. I’ve moved from doing condiments to fixing whole sandwiches to working his old-fashioned cash register, an attraction on its own for kids, especially the bell that sounds when I ring up a sale. Mostly, now, I do all three because it’s just me and him spending a weekend away from the empty house.
The kids, of course, never try a sandwich. Not until they’re twelve or thirteen and taking a bite on a dare from their friends. Winning a bet, maybe. Pocketing enough to buy a sandwich at a different booth. I was eleven when I ate one. Dad said I couldn’t work until I did. He’d trained me for years on liver and hearts at Thanksgiving, stomach and tongue a part of my mother’s handed-down recipes. What I liked best were kidneys, the veal and lamb ones, fantastic once the piss smell has fried itself away. None of them, though, was quite like biting into brains. How it takes getting past the idea.
A week of cholesterol on one bun, my mother, four years dead now, always pointed out, as if that were the source of anyone’s hesitation. On the short list of condiments, onions are most popular, jalapeños lately gaining traction, the sliced tomatoes, my mother’s idea, ordered almost exclusively by women. My father, six years ago, added a whole wheat option for the health conscious. My mother laughed and said, “Work on a vegan version.”
“Not like the old days,” says someone every twenty minutes. They mean the absence of beef, a hint of epidemic in the air. My father says those who find pleasure in brains, despite the long line, are thinning. Look at their faces, he says. Soon, they will be aging out. At a nearby booth, a man offers meatless burgers. At another, there is nothing but my mother’s fantasy, vegetables cooked with a cashew concoction masquerading as cheese.
Here is the secret that I’ve learned. Why, unlike my father, I have confidence in this business—he can raise the price. Not by nickels and dimes, but by dollars. People will pay, my father’s sandwiches expensive but popular because something soon going extinct seems more valuable to those who once took it for granted.
You think cows aren’t going anywhere? Their brains are already taboo. You have confidence in pigs? Just you wait. Think of the large mammals. Even the dangerous ones are lovable as they disappear. The ones who would eat you if they could. The ones, without hesitation, would swallow your brain. Those ones, the huge that people will pay a fortune to see just before they vanish.
latest flash collection, In the Light and Dark, was published on 6 August 2026 by Pelekinesis. His fifth essay collection, After Arson: New and Selected Essays, was released in 2025 by Madville Publishing. His long-form story collections have won the Flannery O’Connor Prize and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.
