Night of the Living Rez

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2022

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“Food for the Common Cold”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“Food for the Common Cold” Summary

Five years after the events of “In a Jar,” David watches his mother and Frick fighting over a headstone that David’s mother wants to keep and Frick wants to destroy. The fight results in Frick leaving and his mother having an emotional breakdown. David’s grandmother visits and comments on a strange smell in the house. Through the conversation that the grandmother then has with David’s mother, David learns that Frick wants to have a child with his mother, but his mother is unable to conceive. David calls his father to ask why his mother can’t have children, but his mother ends the phone call before David can get a satisfactory answer.

A few days later, David wakes to find that his mother has gone missing. David heads to the mechanic’s garage where Frick works, and together the two of them set out to find his mother. They find her at Frick’s cabin in the forest, where his mother has discovered Polaroids of a young girl. When she confronts Frick about these, Frick grabs her by the wrist, pushing David aside when he tries to intervene.

After David returns home with his mother, she confronts Frick. He reveals that the girl in the photos is Corinne, his dead daughter. He recounts the story of the car accident in which Corinne was killed. The three go out to complete Frick’s spiritual rituals, and when they return home, they find that the grandmother was right and there is, in fact, a terrible smell in the house. Frick tracks the smell to a closet, where he finds a turtle has died. The following day, David wakes up feeling a cold coming on, and his mother takes him and Frick to the single headstone. She explains to Frick that, when David was born, he had a twin whose body was tumorous and had spread throughout her own body, which is why she can’t conceive. They all return home, no longer feeling as tense now that these secrets have been aired, and David calls his father.

“Food for the Common Cold” Analysis

“Food for the Common Cold” offers the collection’s first study of the volatility in the relationship between Frick and David’s mother. Both Frick and David’s mother are dealing with Entrapment in Cycles of Trauma, in this case the trauma of losing a child and not having the emotional support to cope with that loss. The collection as a whole explores Violence as an Expression of Masculinity, and like many of its male characters, Frick is only equipped to deal with trauma through violence, which he directs at both David’s mother and David. David’s mother, by contrast, is able to respond productively to Frick’s outburst, learning about his trauma and creating a dialogue by telling the story of her own trauma. In this story, David’s mother offers a potential solution to the problem of Entrapment in Cycles of Trauma: the opening of a dialogue.

The placement of this story immediately after “Get Me Some Medicine” is notable. Both stories center pairs of characters with an unresolved emotional conflict between them. In “Food for the Common Cold,” David’s mother models a healthy recourse for dealing with such conflict. This, then, raises questions about why David later in his life still seems to be unable to handle emotional tension without violence. What events later in David’s life will prevent him from accessing his mother’s coping skills? How much of this is owed to the stunting effects of unhealthy masculinity, and how much to external factors in David’s life? These questions create narrative tension and hint at an arc to David’s emotional development over the course of the collection.