I. Questions and Answers
What can you feel the moment you pick one of them up?
The restaurant style.
Which characteristics do they possess so extremely that the adjective “super” can be applied to them?
Thinness and lightness.
How crunchy are they?
Shatteringly.
Of what do they possess just a touch?
Salt.
What process, applied to what kind of corn, brings out in them all of the corny flavor you’d expect?
Stone grinding, to white corn.
As a vehicle for its consumption, to what do they show the respect it deserves?
Homemade hot sauce or creamy queso.
What is the proper order of operations when consuming them?
Scoop, crunch, smile.
II. Questions without Answers
Just what type of restaurant are we talking about here, being that there is a great deal of variance within the “restaurant” category and the style of chip encountered in one type of restaurant may diverge greatly from the style of chip encountered in another?
Beyond a certain limit point of thinness and lightness, would the chips not simply disappear?
Does this not mean that at the moment of the first bite, the bitten chip will immediately fragment into innumerable shards, as is in the nature of what shatters? And if so, does it not follow that any portion of the bitten chip not already inside the mouth at the moment of the first bite will be effectively lost to the chip eater, caught in the fibers of his garment or scattered at his feet and already being lapped up by a greedy house pet? And if so, in these uncertain times when we are all doing our best to get more for less, would an “unshatterably” crunchy chip in fact not be quite preferable indeed to a “shatteringly” crunchy one?
Okay, but is it sea salt?
Do certain kinds of corn taste cornier than others? Would answering in the affirmative not require applying the same shameful logic according to which it was determined during a shameful period of American history that, for purposes of determining congressional representation, enslaved black people would be regarded as constitutive of only three-fifths of a person?
Is this a zero-sum situation or can the chips simultaneously show to both homemade salsa and creamy queso the kind and quantity of respect they respectively deserve?
Is that really a smile or are you only grimacing in pain as innumerable shards of chip inflict death by a thousand cuts upon the inside of your mouth?
Eli S. Evans would rather fight than snitch, but he’d rather run than fight. Recent or less recent or forthcoming work can be found in: n+1, X-R-A-Y Lit, e*ratio, Berfrois, Drunk Monkeys, Eclectica, On the Seawall, Right Hand Pointing, and elsewhere. Recent chapbook with Analog Submissions Press.