Have you ever wanted to use gasoline as lipstick? Or wished someone would start a campfire up your nose? That’s what it feels like to eat the new Pringles Hot Ones. A chance to be transported to the surface of the sun without your shoes on.

I don’t usually eat Pringles. But I was recently dumped, and it’s left me with a lot of free time to go to the grocery store with my critical mother. She was raised in Poland during communism. Even her hugs are violent.

“Straighten your back when you walk,” my mother says as we enter the grocery store. “You’re hunched over like a depressive.”

I see a sign with fake red flames: PRINGLES! NEW FLAVOR! AISLE 5!

I am depressed, by the way. I was dumped by a thirty-five-year-old man with a combover for a haircut. He ghosted me. Disappeared like a fart into the night.

I move through the grocery store. It’s a labyrinth of cold gray aisles, like the chambers of my ex-lover’s heart. Did I just say that out loud? I feel my mother’s communist eyes on me. “You need a haircut,” she says.

I get to aisle 5 and there’s the display of Pringles. I take down a can. The Pringles man on the label smiles at me. I open the can right there and then.

“What the hell are you doing?” my mother asks.

I stick my nose in the can. I blink involuntarily as the hot pepper smell rocks me. I feel like I’m at an open-air food market in Bolivia, wearing a spice rack on my head as a hat. My eye twitches. My eyebrows wobble like diving boards at the public pool.

I cough and blow Pringles dust everywhere.

My mother swats the air. “Put the cover back on,” she says, like I just unbottled COVID. “That stinks.”

A lot of things stink these days. My lover, past tense. My choices—including the one I’m about to make. I’m Polish, and Polish people don’t eat spicy food. Too much black pepper gives us the hiccups. Our sensibility can be summed up in one word: potato. And that’s not what Pringles are made of.

I eat a Pringle. It’s everything I expected. A Cinco de Mayo hot-sauce water gun to the back of the throat. I could use Preparation H and a gas mask. But I keep eating. And it gets easier, like making a series of bad decisions after binge drinking. I eat until I finish the can.

“What’s the matter with you, eating that much?” my mother asks, regretting that I’m too old to be put up for adoption.

You should never trust food that comes in the same packaging as a tennis ball. And yet… I study the Pringles man on the label. His black hair is swept jauntily to the side. He reminds me of my ex. But smarter and mustachioed. Instantly, I’m in love.

Or is this feeling a heart attack?