December 30, 2023
Mikki Aronoff
Creative Nonfiction
Towards the End Of a Long Night Train Ride from Moscow to the Conference In Rostov-On-Don in 1992,
My Translator Shows Me How to Juice a Pomegranate
❦
We slump from the exhaustion of little sleep, from confessions of inappropriate dalliances and troubles at work shared by strangers who know they will be together for only a short time. We’ve been hurtling through the newly un-done Soviet Union and it’s time for breakfast, our dinner rations of pickled garlic and sour rye long gone.
Galena forages through her duffel, lifts a pomegranate into the air. I should not eat these anymore. I cock my head, puzzled. She tells me of the pomegranate’s reputation for fecundity. She circles her other hand in front of her belly, heaves a deep sigh. Five abortions. I am only 32. I lean over, reach for her hand. There is no birth control here, she shrugs. I stare at Galena, dumbstruck. I think of our well-stocked pharmacies back home in Scotland, contraceptives always available. Morning struggles through our rain-streaked carriage window. I shake my head, peer out the window at toppled statues of Lenin in the grey dawn.
Galena’s shifting in her seat, finding her perfect fulcrum. I will teach you proper way. She begins humming a ballad’s mournful sounds. As she rocks from side to side, she presses her thumbs over the fruit’s tough skin till the seeds soften and release their treasure. She stops to check my attention, as a magician might, and punctures a hole in the bottom of the pomegranate with her pen. She squeezes the globe from top to bottom. Juice bleeds out like liquid garnet into a plastic cup. Now we don’t worry, we drink! We pass the nectar back and forth between us, its sweet essence holding this new secret we share.
Mikki Aronoff has work published in Flash Boulevard, New World Writing, MacQueen’s Quinterly, ThimbleLit, The Phare, The Ekphrastic Review, The Fortnightly Review, Milk Candy Review, Tiny Molecules, The Disappointed Housewife, Bending Genres, Gone Lawn, Mslexia, The Dribble Drabble Review, The Citron Review, RUBY, Atlas and Alice, trampset, jmww and elsewhere. Her stories and poems have received Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, and Best Microfiction nominations.
Christine H. Chen
Fiction
Shopping List
❦
If by chance, you happen to find time to appease your conscience and pay a visit to your Ma, be sure to bring a handful of kumquats, you know how much she likes to suck on the thick bitter skin, squeeze the peel until the sour and sweet juice bursts on her tongue, be sure to take a bundle of Pussy Willows, their silky red buds as polished as Ma's qi-pao she wore in her marriage to your Ba when her waist could fit into Ba's cupped hands, be sure to buy a bundle of lucky bamboos stems to bring strength to your Ma, the twisted or twirled poles the way your Ma used to comb your hair, and braid them before you leave for school, be sure to pack two apples even if your Ma has no more teeth to bite on hard food, slip one green apple to Ma's left pocket—green is money— one red apple in her right pocket — red is prosperity— when she goes to play Mah-Jong and wins a game even when she hates the noise of the tiles hitting table, and the questions the gossipy ladies ask —Where's your daughter? When's she getting married? Why do you live alone? — Ma would put up a proud face and reply with evasive responses like "Huh? What? Can't hear, too noisy" because she'd rather trade the cacophony for the silence of her home than admit her American-raised daughter can’t stay with her for more than 3 days without getting into an argument because you can’t let go of her not letting you be, be sure to include a pot of purple-splashed white orchids, the cascading delicate flowers to signify fertility and abundance, what your Ma wished for you in her heart all these years, to bear children, even just one child, one baby grandchild, for her to hold in her gnarled and hard-working hands, so she'll know all the years she spent wiping tables at the cafeteria and burning her hands from hot steam to pay for your business degree would not be for naught, be sure to carry a dozen oranges even if the basket is getting heavy, your Ma's told you if you ate an orange a day, your skin will remain wrinkle-free like Ah Po in her 80s, oranges bring good fortune not just for your skin but for a household, add more to the good fortune with a pair of pomelos while you're at it, the expensive kind from Thailand at the Asian supermarket, the more you spent for Ma, the less guilt will gnaw at you, be sure to wrap the basket in a clear and crisp cellophane sheet, tie a neat bow in red ribbon, set it at the center of the table when you arrive, your Ma will spend days and hours admiring the display, she will move the basket away from the morning sun, and watch the late afternoon amber light illuminate half an orange the way the earth revolves around the sun, waiting for your next visit.
Contributor Note
Growing up in my Cantonese family in Guangzhou, I was always told how each food holds a special meaning for any occasion. To celebrate the Lunar New Year, e.g., my grandmother would take me to see the cherry blossoms, and at the market, she would buy a bunch of stems to bring home to usher in a new beginning and fresh energy to our household. She would cook Changshou Mian (Longevity Noodles), steamed fish (for abundance), and organize 8 candied fruits and vegetables (sliced lotus roots, coconut strips, carrots, lotus seeds, coconut wedges, winter melons, kumquats, and chestnuts) in our traditional Lunar New Year lacquered red and black treat box for guests. The number 8 in Cantonese is often interpreted as “prosperity” or “to become wealthy” because of its similarity in pronunciation to those meanings so incorporating that number in the amount of ingredients or sweets embodies the wishes for abundance, longevity, and prosperity.
It’s no surprise then I’ve always been fascinated by the symbolism behind food and flowers in my culture, and that food sneaks in my writing. Not to mention that I love eating and tasting different cuisines whenever I have the opportunity. Another theme that appears frequently in my work is the fraught mother-daughter relationship. “Shopping List” entwines food, symbolic items and a mother-daughter dynamic amidst the generational and cultural conflicts that arise in immigrant families: the regret of the daughter unable to meet the mother’s expectations, the use of food and flowers to placate her guilt.
Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction work appears or is forthcoming in CRAFT Literary, Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Atticus Review, trampset, and other literary journals. She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship and the co-translator from French of the hybrid novel, My Lemon Tree (Spuyten Duyvil, forthcoming late 2023). Her publications can be found at www.christinehchen.com
Jennifer Fliss
Fiction
Pears
❦
The pears were lumpen, and Milly thought about going back to the store for new ones. They resembled her thighs and surely Stan would not want to eat them. He had not wanted to partake in her thighs in years. Stan only ate pears. And only Bosc pears.
She handed the newly bought pears over to him anyway and he studied each one, pushing a yellowed nail into the top and grasping its bottom with the claw of his other hand. As expected, he determined none were good enough. He hated mealy pears, he spat it at her as if it was a fact she did not know.
He pulled the fruit apart with his too-long nails and dropped the desiccated thing to the floor. The juiced stained his sleeves, Milly noticed, but Stan didn’t seem to care.
She cleaned the mess, bumping the sponge into his loafers, but he did not move. She tossed the mess into the compost container and put a plate of apples in front of him. She knew it was not the same, but she also had to feed him something. He did not partake of the apples, so after they went brown with the stale air of the room, she ate them herself.
Stan sat in the kitchen chair saying nothing for hours after that. She sat across from him, blinked like trying out a Morse code to get messages to him, but he was unresponsive. She thought of Warren and wanted to be with him instead of her husband, so she left.
Milly now sat in the car in the rain with the podcast about places on this earth hard to reach. Warren with the smooth podcast voice talked about the depths of the Mariana Trench. She spent many nights imagining far-off places with Warren, while Stan lied beside her snoring. Warren described the Great Barrier Reef, the Gobi desert, the inlets of Antarctica.
Stan said she wasted her time with podcasts about things that would only win her trivia night. He said this to her and then whispered the name of Iraqi cities over and over again like a mantra.
He always stuttered when he got to Mosul.
While podcast Warren talked of the blue-blue water of the Maldives, Milly surveyed the grocery store parking lot. Minivans with honor student stickers and SUVs with bike racks. She didn’t have either. Stan had left for Iraq before she could get pregnant, though they’d tried. And now she was so much older anyway.
And anyway.
She had a husband with PTSD. She had no children. She had her podcasts. She had stretches when no one said a word in her house for weeks. She had a husband who made her buy pears in snowstorms and hail and in the middle of the night.
And for him, Milly did it, sometimes driving to four grocery stores at a time. Humid summer nights were the worst, Stan’s rage a sword and her heart a stone. In summer, pears were out of season. Fortunately, it was October.
Milly had loved Stan. Stan had loved Milly. They had had a pear crumble at their wedding instead of a cake. She had loved that dessert and she had pushed it into her groom’s mouth and they sighed in culinary ecstasy and then danced all night.
A flash of lightning lit up the windshield. It was that in-between hour where half the city would be eating dinner and half would be wondering what dinner was going to be or where it was going to come from. Milly yanked the cord from her phone, muting Warren, silencing talk of the beautiful far away. Once she opened the door, she was soaked in an instant. She ran to the store and squelch, squeaked her way to the produce section.
The many cardboard boxes with their molded plastic beds were empty.
There were no more Bosc pears. “Are there any more of these?” she asked an aproned employee. “In the back, maybe?”
“Sorry, this is it,” he said. “But we have these? Comice, D’anjou, Red Bartlett.” He picked each specimen up and shined it on his sleeve, feigned taking a bite and putting it back.
“No, it has to be the Bosc.” Whenever she had asked about his time in the Marines, he only said that he liked the pears in Mosul. He said the Bosc here in the States were the closest thing to it. He said “there could be sweet things…” That’s it; he never finished the sentence. Maybe it was in fact, a complete sentence.
“Well, I’m sorry m’am,” the store employee says.
She felt a little drowny. This is what Milly called it, when she knew that coming home to Stan with no Boscs would send him into a rage, where she’d feel like she was drowning, but knew she was not.
“Did you know there are places you can go and be squashed by water?” she said to the store employee. “You’d be crushed and there would be nothing left of you.”
“Have you been to these places?
She surveyed the shiny fruits. The many other kinds of pears. Watched as other customers delicately put them into their carts and baskets to enjoy later. The unconscious tapping of toes to the easy listening overhead. The soothing beeps of the cash register scanners. The smell of bread from the bakery like it was a gift. She could stay here, she thought, among the strangers and other kinds of pears.
She looked up at him. “I have.”
She filled her cart with fruits, but not pears. Never again, with pears.
Contributor Note
Food is so essential to our lives that it would be impossible to be a writer and have nothing written about food. It can be luscious and luxurious. It can signal poverty or wealth. It can be used as a tool against characters in hate and for characters in love. The technicalities of food are excellent writing tools and prompts too. The way we bake, broil, grill. How we plate our meals or eat straight from the pot. The way we pick food on the side of the road – legally or illegally. The way we scribble family recipes and pass them down like heirlooms. The way we give ourselves papercuts while we frantically tear open a box of mac and cheese. Masticating breakfast into a pulp, spitting out something vile, the sound sour stomach makes in the hour after eating. The way we hunger, the way we fall into gluttony. All of our senses: sight, smell, vision, touch, sound…all relevant when it comes to food and makes our writing stronger and more visceral. There is no better metaphor, tool, and subject to express humanity than using food in our writing.
Jennifer Fliss (she/her) is a Seattle-based writer whose collection, The Predatory Animal Ball came out in 2021. Her forthcoming collection, As If She Had a Say comes out in July 2023 with Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books. Her writing has appeared in F(r)iction, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She can be found on Twitter at @writesforlife or via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com.
Shelley Gaske
Creative Nonfiction
How To Kill My Mothers
❦
I have two moms and which one I kill varies by day.
Sunday: The cruel words of my Adoptive mom outweigh the silence of my Biological mom. Farewell, Adoptive mom.
Monday: Adoptive mom schlepps me to a doctor’s appointment. She lives.
Tuesday: I wonder if my Biological mom looked for me. Biological mom lives.
Wednesday: I read how many young women are forced, shamed, and conned into giving up their children. Biological mom survives; I angry-cry into a burrito.
Thursday: I hold compassion for my Adoptive mom, whose own trauma reigns over her unconsciousness. Biological mom dies.
Friday: My Biological father says I couldn’t exist. Since this essay isn't about him, both moms get a pass and he dies.
Saturday: I would give everything up to feel like I belong in my skin. All five of us die. Two dads are acceptable collateral damage.
Children cannot vote. They are not rational. Their brains are still yawning wide; transit stations without rails. But their screams are their “I Voted” stickers, the crib, their voting booth. Exit polls unanimously show that babies want their mothers.
I am thin enough to zip up XL coats without the seams ripping, if I stand up straight and constrict myself. I am almost thin enough to wear a normal belt. I am thin enough to not eat everything I order at the drive thru. I am thin enough to know how to Zoom for minimal chins. (If you're thinking 'thin' isn't the best word, you are wrong. I refuse to call myself the other word anymore. Enough people I'm supposed to love have called me that.)
I will never have children. This is not news; I have vocalized my lack of spawn since I was old enough to correct people saying “when you have your own children.”
“No, I will not have children. I do not want them.”
“Ah,” they cluck, savoring their own sweet venom, “you'll meet a man and change your mind.”
My mercurial verdict on children hurt my mom most of all. I shook at her fury when I told her.
I was seven.
If my hunch about being a product of rape is correct, I must forget my father who has forgotten me. How would I tell her I reached out to her assailant before I could find her? It’s a gamble I can’t be wrong about.
I said the line once, the one no adoptee is supposed to say.
“You’re not my real mom.”
Her muscles coiled, twisted steel under her skin. Her eyes twinkled with rage. She grinned.
“If you ever try and find her, just know that you’ll kill me.”
She learned a thing or two about trapping people.
Then again, everyone has an expiration date.
When I played My Little Ponies, they were never allowed to fight, yell at each other, or lie. All my Barbies were sisters and none of them wanted to get married either, which took the pressure off my singular Ken. If I had a sister, we wouldn't compete for boys or accolades. I'd have someone to hold while my parents screamed at each other and slammed doors. I'd get to be the sage elder, comforting my younger sibling, who hadn't acclimated to living in an emotional war zone. “They don't mean that,” I'd whisper as we'd hide under the covers. “This is what mommies and daddies do when they love each other very much.”
I am a mouth to feed.
I am a hand to hold.
A body of evidence.
She left the hospital
childless, denying
The evidence of a body.
I won’t feel the moment of my biological mom’s death via cinematic telepathy. I won’t gasp in the street as the loss of her is announced in my bones.
Or maybe I don’t feel her because she is already dead. I’ve crumbled without knowing why before.
I won’t feel the death of my adoptive mother either. Even blood magic has its limitations. She slept like a baby the night her mother died.
Whether nature or nurture, neither mother bestowed upon me the gift of transcendent connection.
If the greatest pain is outliving your child, the greatest crime is ignoring her demise.
A death of a thousand paper cuts is a close-range kill. As I can only do that with one mother, this will not work. So the paper cuts my own skin, each drop a letter, spilling “I’m sorry” to infinity.
Shelley Gaske is a U.S. domestic adoptee based in Oregon. A Writing by Writers fellow and Hedgebrook workshop alumna, her work appears in 68 to 05, The Broadkill Review, LA Parent Magazine and elsewhere. She leads writing workshops for adoptees and is editing her first book, a memoir on treatment-resistant depression.
Beth Hahn
Fiction
How the Sugar Looks Before It Disappears
❦
We wait outside in our poly-cotton spun outfits for the cake factory to open, looking at our phones, wearing white paper sailboat hats, thinking: Who loves me—just a little. Drifting over the sea of likes, our fingers in loose, clear gloves. The half-moon at the nail bed scrubbed. Hair netted.
The first time I see you, I start fake smoking until you notice me. Before we go in, I toss my invisible cigarette to the ground and pretend crush it with the toe of my sneaker.
I work in production; you, in decoration. You pass between stations with a silver cart. Your hair stands straight up in the back like you’ve been licked by a large animal.
It’s cold in the cake factory. We can wear long-sleeved t-shirts underneath poly-cotton. We can wear high socks, but cold is necessary for profit, and we cannot argue with money.
Don’t argue with money, I say, when I notice your chip-scanning frustration at the snack kiosk.
Money’s a car, you tell me, with flat tires.
But packed with jam sandwiches, I answer.
Driven by a bear.
I put your snack with mine and pay for it. Soon I’m wearing your paper sailboat hat. We name our bear Adam. He’s rich but can’t go anywhere because his tires are flat. We eat cake together. I eat from your side of the plate; you, mine.
I tell you how I came to the cake factory, how I was hungry and needed a paycheck. When your life collapsed like a cake made with old baking powder, concave at its center, amorphous shape—you transferred here from another cake factory.
Everyone calls that factory The Mothership because it was the first cake factory. When the Cake Emperor was a child, he started it in a cardboard box by the highway with one bowl and an Easy Bake. We get an affirmation from him every day. The day I met you, it was I am led by my dreams. When I say this to myself, I close my eyes and imagine a cake rising.
The Cake Emperor takes a personal interest in all of us. During my interview, he sat at the head of a fondant-sheened white table wearing a pale mint woolen turtleneck and caramel-tinted glasses. When I spoke of the privilege of cutting the first slice of cake, he removed his glasses and wiped at his eyes.
More stories. Adam looks for a car mechanic. Adam is in love with a mushroom named Cosette. The way our hands fit together.
We take the ferry to and from the cake factory, the wind in our hair. Leaning over and into the blue, I describe the first cake vat—how the butter and sugar went soft and moved together under paddles. How the sugar looked before it disappeared.
You in the dark car. Your eyes. Crystalline. On your tongue. No shame. It’s how we all got here. Nougat. Orange rind. Your hands. Every moment of you.
Weeks like that. The way cake pulls away from the edge of the pan. You start calling me Cosette. At night, I dream of a bride and her silver cake knife.
No one works on the Cake Emperor’s birthday. Instead, there are presentations in the auditorium. I wait for you at the ferry, but you never show up. I text Don’t forget 🎂🤴!
I take the ferry alone.
My heart feels as cold as a batter tray at the back of the walk-in freezer, and soon I know why. You answer I can’t see you anymore.
In the auditorium, the Cake Emperor tells his origin story. How cacao became his empire. How his empire helps the entire world—not just the cake world. How his labor is fair labor. Write down all your goals, says Cake Emperor. Always be grateful.
The girl next to me writes grateful. I write paycheck. Underneath that, I draw a heart. I spend time filling the heart in with black ink, pressing until the paper goes thin. The heart is dense and dreadful. The heart is crooked. I take a picture of it and send it to you, tap, Why?
Mother ⛵️ needs me back. I’m sorry, Cosette.
A tear falls on tempered glass. I wipe it away. My name is not Cosette. I sign out. I log off.
For the Cake Emperor’s birthday, I wanted to give you a present. I had a long-sleeved t-shirt made. A bear cradling a mushroom. So I’ll be with you. So you won’t be cold.
The cake factory pays bi-weekly. I wait for the money symbol on my phone to go food shopping. There is plastic trapped along the shoreline, swaying in marsh grass. On the highway, caught in chain link, suffering the wind.
There are plastic eye goggles for the cocoa dust. For hygiene. There are paper maps that say home. There are exit ramps. There are county lines and special standing shoes for bunions. We can have one half-hour break or two fifteen-minute breaks.
At night, I scrub down the vats. I make it look like there was never any batter. I take the shuttle bus. I buy support socks, ghost cigarettes. I can’t feel you anymore. I stand on the ferry, thinking of the mothership. How it could swallow me.
I scroll. There are icons that say I love you, too. Click them. There is an icon of an egg. Click it. I keep sugar cubes in my pockets, hold them on my tongue, let them dissolve.
There are well-lit signs along the highway. Turn here. Go home. Coming soon. Press one for yes. Scan it. Buy it. Like me. Everyone looking at each other looking at their phones. Wanting. All of us swiping. We are breeding, blending, blocking, vanishing. We are already ghosts, and there is no cure for the ache of spending an entire day in a cake factory and never once being able to say the word cake.
Contributor Note
On my way home from Provincetown, I stopped in Parnassus Books. I didn’t know what I was looking for but was thinking about what I could say about food and its place in my writing. In “How the Sugar Looks Before It Disappears,” cake stands in for desire and need. The factory is the cool the world of capitalism. While the narrator and her paramour find love in that world, like anything fragile and dreamy, it cannot sustain itself for long and collapses. When I came upon the handwritten recipe for poverty cake, I knew I’d found the thing I was looking for. The true sweetness, the real cake—love—is gone in the end, creating a poverty of emotion for the narrator. The illustration fits these characters, who are child-like in their playfulness but whose lives are guided by larger forces.
The booklet—Personal Recipes—has lots of delicious cake recipes and was produced by the Women’s Society of St. Marks Methodist Church in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Beth Hahn (she/her) is the author of the novel The Singing Bone (Regan Arts, 2016) and The City Beneath Her (Regal House, 2025). Her writing has been published in The Chestnut Review, Tiny Molecules, DMQ Review, Ran Off with the Star Bassoon, The Night Heron Barks, Small Orange Journal, The Common, CRAFT, and elsewhere. She is the creator and co-editor of -ette review. Find her at beth-hahn.com
Emily Alice Katz
Creative Nonfiction
Burning Tongues
❦
Two more immigrants spit forth onto the tatty shore of Gilded-Age New York. Isidor: a rabbi ordained in Berlin, now spooning himself English faster than he can swallow, determined to preach and teach as a modern man of God and Israel. Miriam: headstrong, learned, resourceful, generous. Isidor woos her to the clack and sway of the subway train car, flaunting mastery of his new tongue: reading over her shoulder from an advertisement, he exhorts her to take-a cack-a for breakfast. That staccato slippage turning cake—a forkful of New World abundance—to shit. They marry soon after, in 1892. The young couple goes into the grocery business, of which they have no experience and to which Isidor is not suited. But groceries was never the plan.
A post at a neighborhood shul in Yorkville pays $350 a year. Their firstborn arrives: a healthy daughter. Followed by another who, in the silent stretch of an hour’s nap, exchanges crib for coffin. Then two boys, then two more girls. From behind a simple wooden door on Noble Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the rabbi’s exaltations and admonishments ring out among his little flock. Sermons committed completely to memory, in English only, Isidor’s twinned points of pride.
The rabbi secures a better post in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. The house on Nutt Street cradles the clamor of five spirited children and—wondrously—a piano. Miriam stews chicken and kindles Sabbath lights, stitches seams: for husband, for children, for beloved dolls. Dresses up and dresses down as duty requires. Isidor directs the raising of an edifice befitting his pulpit, his congregation. Orates in stentorian tones. Miriam helps burnish sermons, ever Isidor’s glory.
But the rabbi yearns for New York. A grander stage, more fitting to his talents, Miriam eventually agrees. So then: a congregation in the Bronx. And after that a congregation in Washington Heights. The desk lamp burns in Isidor’s cloister on the upper floor of the family brownstone until dawn sizzles over the Hudson. Until he takes to his bed at fifty-nine, restless and exhausted, and never rises again.
Years later, the grown children warm themselves to the salvaged embers of Miriam’s reign—recalling her hands mending, smoothing; recounting her wise counsel. Head and heart and hearth.
Their father’s birthright: a way with words. An ache for greatness that gnaws itself to abscess.
And this gift too, which they cannot forget: for each child’s birthday, the rabbi palms a single egg, cracks its contents into the smoking iron pan. Works its yolk and whites to perfection in any style the celebrant desires.
That exquisite singeing in the mouth—like infant Moses, touching Pharaoh’s smoldering coal to tongue.
Find Emily Alice Katz’s contributor recipe, Natalie’s Boobies, in the Culinaria
Emily Alice Katz’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in North Carolina Literary Review, Salamander, Meridian, South Carolina Review, and Lilith, among other publications. Her short story collection, The Book of Nut and Other Stories, was designated a finalist for the 2019 Eludia Award. She teaches in American Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill and lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her family. You can read more about her at https://emilyalicekatz.com/
Nazanin Knudsen
Creative Nonfiction
Her Hands
❦
Imperfect strokes master ordinary skills. My daughter presses the cookie cutter close to the edge of the rolled-out dough. The gingerbread girls sway between her hands before the backdrop of her miniature red apron, losing their form when they finally land on the baking sheet. The perfectionist in me reaches to fix them, but I hold back.
Flour dusts my face when the kids add it to the mixing bowl. They always argue about who ate more cookie dough, and I forget to set the timer when we eventually place the cookies in the oven. Each time we bake together, I remind myself that cookies aren't the point. Being here in this moment, doing something tactile together is. The tenderness of the dough reverberates in the swirl of the mixer and echoes an ostinato in our collective family mind for years to come.
I wish I had baked and cooked with my mother. I never did before she died. I sat at our red fiberglass kitchen table, completing hours of homework as she prepared herbs to freeze for the winter, made beef patties imprinted with the faint lines of her hands, fried eggplant on the stove, and stirred dried mint over the heat. These memories are a carnival of aromas, sights, and sounds. And yet, I wish they were more visceral. I long for the touch of her slender hands.
My daughter moves the last cookies to the baking sheet before wiping her sticky fingers on her apron. It is the only one that fits her. The apron has delicate lace trim and little green and gold pears sitting perfectly in two baskets, one on top of each pocket. This apron was my sixth-grade school project. My mother helped me operate the sewing machine while she embroidered. The hands who typed with dreams of a job in the computer industry created delicious meals, baked my birthday cake, and sewed colorful clothes for me. She stitched the red cloth held taut in the embroidery hoop, her fingertips quietly concocting little delights in the background of my life.
The timer beeps. The oven has come to the temperature. My daughter tosses the apron on the counter, running off to play. I reach to fold and put it away. Instead, I trace my daughter’s floury fingerprints on the lace. And for a few seconds, I allow my fingers to linger on the embossed fruit baskets, savoring my mother’s beautifully shaded gold pears.
Contributor Note
It wasn’t until my late twenties, after I moved to the US, that I became interested in cooking. I miss my hometown, from the scent of kabob and naan mingling in the greys of traffic to the aromas and colors in mom’s kitchen. Watching her cook made its mark in my subconscious. I can figure out what is missing or how to improve a dish.
My husband loves to cook and try new things. As we chop, dice, and slice ingredients, we talk about my memories of home, look up the origins of unique herbs and spices, and we get to just be together. This has become our thing, one of the ways we have grown closer—we tweak our relationship just like we do for our favorite American and Persian recipes. And although it doesn’t always go smoothly, we try to include our children in this togetherness.
I write about my memories of Iran and my longing for home. I get to relive the moments I miss and share them with my family, who have yet to visit Iran. Food is an essential element of home, often sprinkled over my words. Writing grounds me, and food bridges my two worlds, keeping me connected to my people wherever they may be.
Naz is an Iranian-American writer and filmmaker. She holds an MFA in Writing and an MA in Media Arts. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Pidgeonholes, Ruminate, (mac)ro(mic), and Lost Balloon. She lives and teaches in North Carolina. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @nazbk.
Linsey Liao
Hybrid Prose
Of Pears and Men
❦
Contributor Note
It’s easy to overlook the pleasures embedded in mundanities of everyday life. Our palates, accustomed to a constant exposure of spices, juices, and flesh, provide us with incentive to chew and swallow, calories extracted from dishes to ensure our survival. But what is living, if not made attuned to the flavors of everyday life? One day last fall, I found myself fixated on the texture of a single peeled pear, it’s weight cold and hard against my October hands. Cradling the pear, I felt alive. I held the fruit to remember it, and I hold my poem to remember myself, how it feels to breathe, consume and remain living.
Linsey Liao (she/her) is a student from Brooklyn, New York. She’s an adrenaline junky and a sucker for romance, indie music and sake. In her spare time, she’s either playing the electric bass, editing for Helicon Lit, or roaming around the city overdressed for the occasion. Find her on Instagram @_linseyL).
Andrea Marcusa
Fiction
What it Takes
❦
I grab both handles of the turkey roasting pan, but the potholder slips, and the handle sears the soft skin of my inner wrist like a filet. I keep quiet. The sounds from the next room are not calm and soothing. My guests, hungry for drama, are already seated at the Thanksgiving table with their knives out.
“You’ve got your mom’s overbite with those little Chicklet Gum teeth.” My sister’s words sail over my preteen boys’ heads which are pressed together over a tiny screen where they are proving their personhood. My husband who is holding court, or down the fort, depending on who is speaking is already wearing out his winning smile.
“What is she doing in that kitchen? She’s so slow. Not even an olive on the table." My mother has brought her impatience with her. She has ample amounts to dispense on her loved ones, and always makes sure she has enough left over for my dwindling father. In this way you could call her a thoughtful woman. Someone who makes sure she has enough for everyone.
This morning I’d awoke with the warm feeling of welcoming. I’d forgotten about my blind spot, the one that appears right before Thanksgiving like ads for Pumkin Spiced Latte.
There’s no altering what my mother or sister say. This is how they are. The stinging inch-long welt puckers on my delicate skin. A chair scrapes against the floor, its commanding screech can only belong to my mother. I stick an ice cube into a paper towel, wrap it around the wound and pull down my sleeve over my wrist. She’s not getting near my burn with her onerous home remedies and attitude. Nor my sister, who would use my burn as a warmup act to her extravagant retelling of her horror as a speck of hot chicken fat defiled her neck in 2004.
I glance at the back door. There’s still time to take my bow and arrow, my loin cloth and blanket and push off, leaving behind Mom's wagging tongue and my lobster-faced brother-in-law complaining to my sister-in-law about the heat.
I’ll dive for oysters and steam them over a fire, gloriously alone, on a soft white sand beach during perfect sunsets. A pile of gray pearls, found within the mollusks’ succulent flesh, will rest at my feet. Yes, this time, I will stand before my guests with my sturdy bow strapped to my back and declare, “Enough!” before exiting.
But my leaden feet hold me there. The only route they know is to the dining room where I set down platters and casseroles for eight mouths.
My family. The only family I have. Pearls, pearls, pearls.
My brother-in-law eyes the roasted bird. “Finally!” Serving bowls eagerly travel from person to person, gravy splashes on the ironed white tablecloth, my boys rip into turkey wings with their overbites, delighted murmurs rise while forks and knives tap and scrape the bone china until the carcass is stripped and picked clean.
As the balm of roasted flesh and pureed roots soothes and lulls, out of thin air, there rises a halo of something soft and luminous that hovers.
While everyone tastes tart and sweet apple pie, my hand still clenches my bow and my wrist throbs. Another family meal without real bloodshed. I relax in my seat at the end of the table and savor the fleeting radiance.
Even my mother’s face unpinches.
Contributor Note
Food and the process of making, serving, and eating it continue to inspire me. I’ve written about icing cupcakes on a date and how the date showed his withholding ways by how parsimonious he was in sharing the buttercream frosting. I’ve written about a woman trying to rekindle the spark of her marriage with a trip to the farmer’s market. “What it Takes” is my second piece about Thanksgiving. (The first appeared in Heavy Feather Review where I compared the activity surrounding the eating of the Thanksgiving meal to hysterectomy surgery. I know, I know…but it worked! ) There is something about carving a turkey and its mutilated carcass that continues to engage my imagination, as well as all the characters that can show up for this holiday. In addition, Thanksgiving involves so many dishes, lots of passing, spooning, and serving of food, and clean up, which are all opportunities for characters to react and for the narrator to have fun.
Andrea Marcusa’s work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Citron Review, Cutbank, Booth, River Teeth, and others. She’s received recognition in a range of competitions, including Smokelong Quarterly, Raleigh Review, Cleaver and Southampton Review. She is a member of the faculty at The Writer’s Studio and also studies there in its Master Class with Philip Schultz. For more information, visit: andreamarcusa.com or see her on Twitter @d_marcusa.
Melissa Ostrom
Fiction
Love Makes Us
❦
On the Sunday morning Tanner left (for good this time, Lisa felt, remembering how the goodbye left his mouth: swiftly, as if to rush past the sting), Lisa called Marilyn and said, Come over. I’m making soup.
And Marilyn, who knew her friend well, her normal voice and now this, with its peculiar pitch and catch, heard in the invitation a cry from the bottom of a mineshaft. Help. Tanner trouble, no doubt.
She threw a coat over her t-shirt and flannel pants, stepped sockless into the furred interior of her boots, and drove across town.
It was windy. The gusts gathered the previous day’s snow and shot over ragged fields and the road, forming snaking ridges and low-coursing clouds. Marilyn passed the Agnellos’ farmhouse and barn. All year long, dissected vehicles dotted the front yard, but now snow covered them, and the cloaked cars looked like great pieces of furniture covered with white sheets. She’d seen something like that in a British period film. The servants, shutting up a townhouse for the winter while their rich employers traveled to Bath, shrouded the furniture. So it didn’t get dusty, Marilyn guessed. Must be nice, having that kind of money, she thought, turning left onto Freeman Road. Then, abruptly: What did Lisa expect, dating a married man? Sure, Tanner was separated. But he and his wife had been separated for years! What else besides love kept them from finalizing the divorce? Lisa should have seen this, protected her heart, saved her love for someone who deserved it.
Marilyn glared at the gray sky above her friend’s ranch house and thought, Love makes us stupid.
Lisa pretty much said the same thing, chopping an onion and frying it in bacon fat, adding carrots, celery, chuck roast, looking in the fridge, tossing in this and that. This whole time, she sighed, it was like I was watching myself make a mistake, as if there were two of me, one feeling, feeling, the other me shaking my head and asking, what the hell?
Marilyn nodded, watched Lisa pour a pitcher of water into the Dutch oven, smiled a little when her friend checked out the coffee at the bottom of the pot and threw that into the mixture, too. This two selves business, Marilyn mulled, not weird at all. Hadn’t she been another kind of person, sneering at this relationship disaster on the way over, muttering about it just last week to her sister? Lisa’s sadness chastened Marilyn, made her wish she was more consistently the sort of person—friend—she was being right now, the kind who just showed up and listened.
Later, hours later, after the wind calmed and the sky cleared, after talking and staring outside at the bright blue starkness in the trees, Lisa went to the stove to test the soup and, with a liberal sprinkling of salt and a grinding of pepper, declared it done. She delivered bowls of it to the kitchen table. Marilyn collected spoons and napkins, bread and butter. They sat.
The soup smelled good. The chair felt right, familiar. Impulsively, Marilyn reached across the table and gave her friend’s hand a squeeze.
Lisa smiled. Are we saying grace then?
Okay. Grace. Marilyn said it with a laugh and got one in return.
In a way, though, Marilyn meant it—grace, that was. She didn’t know what it meant, not really. But she recognized it at this small table, the mystery of it. Sustaining, like laughter. Warm, like clasped hands.
Melissa Ostrom is the author of The Beloved Wild (Feiwel & Friends, 2018), a Junior Library Guild book and an Amelia Bloomer Award selection, and Unleaving (Feiwel & Friends, 2019). Her stories have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She lives with her husband, children, and dog Mocha in Holley, New York. Learn more at http://www.melissaostrom.com or find her on Twitter @melostrom.
Anne Panning
Hybrid Prose
The Size of a Dime
❦
She never forgot the tiny pie her mother made for her
dollhouse. A dab of dough, domed. Brown edges pinched
perfect. For years she obeyed the hushed rules of miniature:
she potted plants in her mother’s old thimbles. Cinched
curtains back with dental floss and thumbtacks. Postage stamps
on the walls as art. Buttons for plates. Bottle cap bowls. How had
she grown up in an old gray trailer and still loved the slim bright
glimmer of small? She never wished for something larger. Until
bad news blew and she understood the danger of the suffering
collapse of a canopy bed. The way you can lock the front door
so they can’t trespass against it. She knew if she wanted a house
as large as her hunger for babies and trees she’d have to leave
behind pillows the size of saltines. She’d have to shelter the
dollhouse under darkest of eaves.
Anne Panning published a memoir, Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss (2018). She has also published a novel, Butter, as well as the short story collections, The Price of Eggs and Super America, which won The Flannery O’Connor Award and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her short publications include Bellingham Review, River Styx, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, The Florida Review, Passages North, Black Warrior Review, The Greensboro Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, The Kenyon Review, Five Points, River Teeth, RUBY, and Brevity (5x). She is currently working on a memoir about her late father—a barber and addict. Originally from rural Minnesota, she teaches creative writing at SUNY-Brockport.
Sumitra Singam
Fiction
Peel, Boil, Cook
❦
Above the sweet, musky stink of body odour, the tang of urine, the urgent calls of porters, the shuffle and jostle of the passengers moving to the train doors, there is a shrill call of “Kamala! Kamala!” A hundred rupees - possibly a steal, possibly a scam - buys a bag. Check each fruit for intact skin, no portals through which a burrowing bug could infect the guts. Peel the thick orange skin, the citrus tang smelling out of place here. Eleven safe segments to savour.
The chai-wallah has a steaming pot, stewed against the day’s heat, a magic potion stirred counter-clockwise. He has just a few cups, each jostling customer carefully fountaining the tea into their mouths, an unspoken no-touch policy. But bring your own cup just the same, and watch as he smiles a little at the unhandy Western grip of the thing. Sip the chai tentatively, wishing you could toss it down your throat as carelessly as the one billion do.
The roadside stall boasts golgappa, aloo tikki, papdi chaat. All with a generous sprinkle of raw onion and coriander, gathered with the wallah’s nimble hands, the deeply pigmented lines on his palm telling you the story of his slum home, the open hole outside for his toilet, his one-room kitchen-living-dining-bedroom, his river-laundromat. Receive the plateful anyway, because this is Home, and this is the food of Home, and ignore the curdling twist of your stomach, the burn in your skin, the pull of your blood pressing you over the seas, to that place, that other quiet, ordered, germless, foreign place. And feel yourself to be a traitor, a coconut, an alien in your own land, picking your way through its vibrant colours and smells by peeling, boiling, cooking all of the life out of it.
The Food Chain
❦
Rain weeps down the windows, viscous and slow. The children create a fug in the room removing jackets and hats, steam rising from their bodies. Jojo is the last to come in – he’d had to run from the tree at the far end of the schoolyard. He goes to his seat quickly, head down, keeping his arms close to his side.
The other children chatter and clank like a machine around him. Cogs working together to a rhythm only they know. This togetherness, reciprocity, bewilders him.
He is happiest in the language of nature. He understands an ant’s singular quest for food, or a tree’s reaching for sunlight to bear fruit. That is purposeful and clear. These children with their squawkings, and games, and borrowings and lendings, he cannot fathom.
Miss Potts goes over to him, “Hungry Jojo?"
He shrugs, unsure what the correct answer for this is. He has a biting pain in his belly that is there all the time, and sometimes food helps, but not always. He had a bruised apple and a pack of twisties in his lunchbox. The other children had sandwiches, or even little pots of soup or rice. They eat with such indifference, as if this were something to be taken for granted. Gideon always has a note from his mother, hearts and crosses printed on it like a foreign language. He sees Mama grabbing the twisties from a gaping pantry shelf, her hands shaking so hard she can barely zip the lunchbox up.
“You okay, Jojo?"
What is ‘okay’? How can he understand the heft of that word? It feels big, like his skin might split if he were ’okay’.
Jojo feels something stir in his limbs hot, pulsing. His eyes narrow, and his insides twist. His arm reaches out of its own accord to tip over Shilpa Haresh’s pot of rice and curry.
The curry swells, and carries him on a wave to the rain outside. He floats away from the noise of the classroom, of Miss Potts’ sharp exclamations, and his classmates’ clamouring. Away to the trees, and the insects and the birds. There, he can forget his body, his life, his lunchbox. There he can breathe.
Contributor Note
I stood no chance, really—an Indian, born in Malaysia. Food is in the DNA of both of those cultures. Growing up, there was always a smell – pungent, sharp, earthy. There was always a sambar simmering, masala for kootu being ground. Paati, my paternal grandmother would teach me, tetching at my slowness. My mother and aunts teach me now via video call, “Add the besan now! No! Slower!” It is clunky, but it is our connection, via the glue of masala pastes.
Food is more than sustenance for me (acknowledging those in the world who don’t have that privilege). It is a belonging, an identity, an entire way of holding the body – how I sit cross-legged on the floor for banana leaf meals, how I eat with my fingers (what is with all these TV Indian families eating with cutlery?). I cannot do anything without involving food, much less write.
I have a picture of Paati in my kitchen – she is cackling, her mouth wide open, her bright eyes crinkled at the edges. It feels like she’s right there, tetching, asking if I’m chopping veggies for humans to eat or for cows and goats? It is that feeling I want to capture. That deep love, the sharp wit, the edge of pain, the strong connection to food, to self and belonging. I’m going to keep doing that, to be true to myself, and I hope that comes across on the page.
Sumitra writes in Naarm/Melbourne. She travelled through many spaces to get there and writes to make sense of her experiences. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?). She works in mental health. You can find her and her other publication credits on Twitter: @pleomorphic2
Sudha Subramanian
Fiction
The Making of Vazhakka Mezhakkuperatti
❦
The mustard seeds spluttered and sizzled in the hot coconut oil. The acrid smoke dug into my senses, and my tummy warned the beginning of the funny dance.
“Distract yourself,” I mumbled. I counted pickle jars, re-arranged the cutlery rack, and played with my beaded bracelet.
“Give it a stir and then add the chilies,” Athe, my Mother-in-law, pointed to the wok with finely diced raw bananas on the stove.
“And yes,” she said, “add a spoon of coconut oil in the end. That leaves a lasting flavor.”
The fumes mocked my taste buds, and my tongue turned sour. I swallowed and waited for the moment to pass.
“You are only pregnant,” Athe retorted for burning the Mezhakkuperatti during a bout of nausea last week.
I didn’t want to repeat it. I threw my head back and focussed on the buzz of the exhaust. But the smell spread through, and it teased, tickled, poked, and pricked till sweat oozed from my sides. I gripped the counter in one last attempt. It was only a matter of seconds before I cupped my mouth, but I remembered to switch off the stove.
“I had six children, and I cooked throughout my pregnancy for the whole family.” she threw her hands up and arched her brows so high that I thought they scraped her hairline.
“It is tough,” I steadied myself.
“You better hurry,” she motioned with her eyes, “and don’t overcook it. It is stir-fry, not payasam,” she remarked with a sigh.
I bit into a slice of lime and picked up the pace, adding some more coconut oil. I had to get the right consistency.
The mound of soft rice on the plate was appealing that afternoon. I wanted an uneventful meal with no interruptions or comments. The Vazhakka Mezhakkuperatti or Raw Banana stir-fry churned my stomach, and bile gathered at the back of my throat. I tried to arrest it before it reared its ugly head and rubbed my chest, praying I didn’t have to rush to the bathroom. A pair of eyes burrowed from the other side of the table. I shifted my feet and pictured mountains, grasslands, and the ocean. But nothing helped. I huffed, clutching the sink, when I heard Athe.
“What is with this generation?” Her tone dripped with disapproval. I berated myself for disappointing her again.
I was arranging the books that evening when I heard the familiar voice. “Do you want vegetables?” It was her favorite vendor from the farmer’s market.
Do you have anything good?” She eyed the large cart he was pushing. “Fresh, from my village. Fresh raw bananas, too,” he pointed.
“OK. Wait,” Athe announced as she grabbed the plastic basket and purse before heading out. “Athe,” I called after her, “please don’t buy any raw bananas.” My throat tingled.
“You are not the only one who eats in this house,” she waved her hand around, “There are others who relish that vegetable.”
I stood at the door, watching her back. The saliva oozed, filling my mouth, and the beads around my wrist tightened.
I staggered for the cooking ritual the following day. The shelves, the pans, and the pots reeked of ugly memories. The smells had stories I wanted to forget, but they sneered at me with fangs and roared. Four long green bananas greeted me with a sly grin in the refrigerator. They were fresh and thick. I dug my fingers into my palm even as my gut growled.
“You have any cravings? Sweets or savories?” asked my next-door neighbor, who I have met only three times in the past year, yesterday. I had known only bitterness that lingered longer than it should. I knew what I didn’t want. It was not ice cream or bags of chips.
“You should eat all your favorite food to get over the sickness,” the old woman across the street patted my belly when I mentioned how hard it was.
Everyone celebrated, but Athe filled my meals with Mezhakkuperatti, sarcasm, and icy stares.
I picked the four cold upturned curves from the vegetable tray and shoved them into the black garbage bag. Athe stood in the hallway, hands on her hips.
“Where are you going?” Her brows furrowed. Her silver strands stood out in the light.
A slight shudder threatened me in my tracks. I twisted the chain of my bangle that held the brown beads with my thumb till they came loose. The pea-sized brown spheres drizzled liberally across the floor.
Athe glared.
I marched past her, feeling the first whiff of freedom, and clicked the door open.
“Hey.” Athe’s voice scoured over the din of traffic.
I didn’t stop till I reached the large circular concrete structure where everyone dumped their waste.
“Are you mad? Who do you think paid for these? Your father?” Her dagger eyes poked a deep hole inside.
I shoved the cover in and dusted my hands with a smile.
“There are others...” She began.
The sky turned rosy pink, while a lone parakeet screeched above. It was time to head home and gather the brown beads from the floor to create a new bracelet, wrestle with the jammed kitchen window, and let in the refreshing sounds and smells of the outside world. I didn’t hear Athe again.
Contributor Note
Food inhabits our world like air. My earliest memory is of my grandmother rotating the grinding stone crushing coconut scrapings and chillies, and teaching me about aroma and taste. She introduced me to the ideology: WE ARE BORN TO EAT. My father’s (almost every day) dissertation on how to slurp the last remnants of rasam (Molagutani soup) from the Eeya Chombu (tin pot) or the ten variations of it is a testament to this philosophy. I listen, I feel, and it spills over as words where my world merges with the imagined. Flavors, recipes, and the lingering after-taste run their rivulets and capture an atmosphere, the inner conflict, and the memories that make us who we are. My grandmother’s mantra is Kaapi (coffee) or Vazhakka Mezhukkuperatti (Raw Banana stir fry) because our fiction will remain bland and tasteless without food.
The making of Vazhakka Mezhukkuperatti came to me on a chilly winter afternoon as I stirred vegetables in the coconut oil. The pungent aroma evoked a dormant story I had witnessed years ago, and it egged me on to voice it. Soon, the humble stir fry became an element of anger, hate, and a tool for the woman to be heard. Ensconced in a home, the raw banana stir-fry tells the world that sometimes food is more than taste. We may be born to eat, but for that, we must stay alive.
Sudha Subramanian is an independent writer of Indian origin living in Dubai. She writes fiction and newspaper articles. Her words have found space in Roi Faineant Press, West Trestle Review, Oranges Journal, and Door is Ajar, to name a few. When Sudha is not writing she watches the many birds and butterflies that visit her garden. Connect with her on Twitter @sudhasubraman or on IG @sudha_subraman
Christopher Tang
Creative Nonfiction
打包: Takeaway
❦
I understood from a young age that it would be hard for me to make a home. How privileged, my mother says, that I am able to wear my yellow skin in the presence of white-faced men and still sound like one of them. She is right. On a staycation holiday, a group of boys asks a pre-teen me if I can speak English. Probably better than you, I reply, later on in my head. I am those boys, and when I stand at the entrance of a wonton and congee shop just two streets away from my grandfather’s hospital, I forget the word “takeaway” in Cantonese. I tell them the food is for my 爷爷. He is unable to make it because he is ill, but he still needs the 粥. My mum can’t collect it either because she is at his deathbed. Also, I’m not Chinese. Well, I am, but I live in the UK. Like I said, my grandfather is ill. They look at me with pity.
call the boys down for dinner
❦
I’m washing the dishes like a good son, cleaning the knives that glisten with pork blood and the vegetable dust from your garden. You remind me that to be in a happy household, one must serve. Bent forward against the table, pouring red wines into a finger-stained glass, bruising my sleeves across plates of boned fish and spring onion that you summoned with the flick of your chin. Eating first is illegal. A singular chopstick marks the death of a parent.
When will you grow up?
Contributor Note
There’s no embodiment of identity purer than the food we consume. For me, eating has always been synonymous with comfort: it’s my mother’s warm congee with spring onion and soya sauce; my father’s teriyaki salmon or my brother’s creativity in the curries he cooks. Food defines and nourishes; tames that innate fire of hunger and desire that is embedded within all of humankind. It’s in every culture; inescapable in its nature. So, both my pieces (“打包 : Takeaway” and “call the boys down for dinner”) come from a place of home. Just like with writing nonfiction itself, it is a reflection of who I am, where I belong and what it is I desire to be. Whether it’s finding my place as a British-born Chinese boy struggling to speak Cantonese at a takeaway in China or taking my seat at the family dinner table, I am constantly connected by the very things I digest. Even now, I’m learning to be more creative in both my cooking and writing – casually trying new recipes from off the top of my head, exploring unseen perspectives, caramelising onions in a different way than what I’m conditioned to. I hope to keep understanding. I hope to make things that are worth tasting; worth describing and rolling around in the mouth. That’s how identity is found.
Christopher Tang is currently an MA Writing student at the University of Warwick, where he also works as Co-Editor-in-Chief at The Warwick Tab. With an interest in poetry and creative nonfiction, Christopher explores themes of Chinese culture, identity and memory in his writing. His work can also be found in other publications such as Outlander and Seaside Gothic. Upon graduation, Christopher hopes to later publish his own debut poetry collection.
Robin Zlotnick
Fiction
A Postmodern Wife in Her Kitchen
❦
On Monday, she got the urge to stick her hand on the burning orange coil. She thought it’d make a pretty pattern on her palm, like a maze. Instead, she finished mashing the potatoes, wormy strands pushing up through the grate at the bottom of the pot with each thrust, and she served them to him as he sat and waited like a dog, alongside a steak, seared and bleeding, like he liked it.
On Tuesday, the beep of the oven timer dug itself into her brain and pulsed with her heart. She shut her eyes and lowered her face over the burbling saucepan of creamed corn, each tiny explosion promising to scald her smooth skin. As she inched closer and closer, the pebbles of corn cried out — inhuman, sizzling wails, tiny tragic screams. I hear you. Beep, beep pushing through her eyes now, down, down, beep, beep, down, down, beep, beep, beep, beep, done. While he twiddled at the table, she scooped the corn onto his plate next to the glazed pork tenderloin, perfectly succulent, cooked just to the right second.
On Wednesday, the fiery maw of the gaping oven begged her to climb in while she basted the turkey breast in a greasy bath of its own juices. Her skirted knee rested on the open oven door; she started to crumple into a ball, and she tipped forward ever so slightly, immediately cushioned by the warm heat, embraced by the creeping curls of steam, lured by the promise of doneness. She folded further in, sprayed the hot bird flesh, and let the smoke slither down her throat and fill her lungs until she couldn’t breathe. The peas were mushy that night. She could tell from his face, which wrinkled, pea-like, though he didn’t say a thing.
On Thursday, she bent upside-down and looked through her legs at the red hot broiler while the casserole burned. Its snake-like, beckoning fingers buzzed with electric promise. Come. Scorched forehead, toasted toes, charred heart. She flew up to standing, spun around, stuck out her hand, and extended it into the oven. Dizzy, ecstatic, she watched it bake between the casserole and broiler, witnessed the shape of her fingers warp with the waves of heat, and waited until a blister bubbled up on the back of her hand before she pulled it out. She popped the taut dome with the tine of a fork, flicked at and fingered her burn. Hm, he said that night, looking at his plate, scraping the black skin off the top of his tuna and noodles with his fork. Hm.
On Friday, he returned to a smoke-filled home, alarm howling, all four spiral burners bright and hot, oven roaring, red mouth open, angry flames billowing out. He sprang into action, tried to kick close the oven door, attempted and failed to turn the burners’ melting dials to off, and swiped at the sinuous smoke that seemed to swirl tighter and tighter around him until his eyes stung and his nose filled and his cry—What did you do?—fizzled into the thinning air. Behind the smoke, the oven’s flames leaped for him in an exuberant fiery rage, swallowing him for good. In the corner the kettle screamed, steam bursting free from the spout, spreading and slowing and floating up, up, up, away.
Robin Zlotnick is a writer, editor, and potter who lives in New England with her husband and the most perfect dog in the world. She is a Best of the Net-nominated writer with work published in places like X-R-A-Y, Rejection Letters, Peach Mag, Identity Theory, and more, and she has humor published in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Belladonna, Slackjaw, and elsewhere. You can check out her work at robinzlotnick.com and follow her on Twitter @RobinZlotnick.
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