Modernity

A cell phone is her only connection to the present. She carries it wih her in a pocket. Within the long sweeping skirts that she wears each day — each skirt layered with patchwork fabrics or transparent crinolines, or sliky flying strips — within each skirt is a pocket. A lot of the time her hand is in her pocket fingering the phone. Holding it, waiting for a pulse. The messages from Enrique recorded in her voicemail are three years old. She’s expecting the new one. The new message that he never sends. He never calls.

Still…sometimes she speaks to him on the phone — into the phone. No one listens on the other end, but she talks into the phone anyway. That phone (it’s clunky and red with a ring like a hissing racoon) is her one connection to the past, to the outside world, to any orbits other than her own concentrated and small one. The phone is her only concession to the time in which she lives.

Mouse in the Brushes

All that was left of the pastry brushes were a few wooden handles badly bitten. All the brush hairs lay in a random pattern on the floor and in the storage drawer and some had blown out the window. Bettina is the one who found the droppings. She scooped up the little black pellets with a spatula and let them slide into a tiny burlap pouch. She used burlap pouches instead of zip-lock bags. There was not one piece of plastic in the whole “kitchen.”

When I came into work she had already cornered the mouse. A very small brown one, trapped in a corner near the icebox and frozen still in that way animals freeze to be less noticed. Bettina was frozen too and keep her stare close on him.

“Franny, get me the marble box.” The marble box sat on the counter near the sink. Sometimes we soaked weeds in there. Sometimes we filled it with nut shells. I picked it up (it weighs a ton) and brought it to her.

“Put him in it,” she said pointing to the minuscule furry beast.

“How?”

“Just pick him up and put him in.”

I was about to say no, I can’t do that. Actually touch him. A possibly slimy rodent with probably pointy teeth and angry and scared of me too. But then I couldn’t get the words out. Bettina never left any room in the place for words like that. You just had to do what she wanted. So, totally unlike myself, I took step after step toward the little creature. As I got closer I almost felt sorry for him. I almost started to like him. I got right up to him, the hard toe of my black clog almost touching him. He still didn’t move.

I picked him up by the tail. He didn’t squirm. I walked him over to the marble box I had set on the table near Bettina, and I put him in.

He didn’t jump out. He just stayed in there.

Bettina put the lid on. “Good,” she said, and put the box in the cupboard.

Poultry

I am the dead chicken. Of course I am dead. Of course I can still see. I know the kitchen. I have been here before. Thousands of times. Millions. I have been in primeval kitchens, ones made of rocks in caves, crevasses in sands, castles and tents. I am cooked over and over again. I am eaten. Swallowed. Pushed and torn, my molecules pulled apart, my sinews and bones bolster my organs, my sinew and bone to your sinew and bone.
They cut me in all places.
Every part to its purpose. Delicately they extract my bones. They roll my flesh, my meat. They stuff it and tie it. They keep one hole and fill my empty self with foods with lemons and onions with thyme and rosemary. My traveling companions, my supporting staff, my supporting cast, my co-actors, we go to our fates together. And return and return. A cycle like an engine starting, running, stopping. We are the feeders.

Home Fires

As soon as she gets into her apartment, before she turns on a light, she moves with fast, wide steps to the other end of the living room. The terrace door lets in light from a sky fading from pink to gray. She presses the message button on her machine. A man’s accented voice says slowly, plaintively…
I love you.
Where are you?
It’s Enrique. Enrique’s deep, slow voice, a voice that reminds Bettina of thickening smoke. She’s heard this message before, she’s heard it every day for the last 8 months. It is only one message, an old message, one that she keeps, one that she listens to daily as if new, one that is waiting for a matching message, a newer one from Enrique. But she’s heard nothing new from him. He seems caught in a soundless place, muffled by a big world, so absorbed in something else that no words can get through to her.

Please Don’t Use Dill

It was only one little branch of dill, a sprig really. In fact, it was probably, accidentally, mixed in with a bunch of parsley that I didn’t even notice until for some reason I felt compelled to smell the herb pesto before plopping it into the rice. Then I thought — was that dill? But shook my head and forgot about it. So what if it is, I thought. It’s just a smidgen.

But of course, not for Bettina. She took one bite of the risotto and screamed…”Is that DILL???”

I shrugged. Better to stay out of it. She threw the whole bowl of rice out the back door and raced into the armoir for three bags of pasta. Or what she calls pasta. I have no idea where she gets the stuff, but she calls it pasta and it looks like oatmeal.

“Go tell the guests we are preparing a special treat ala minute. Tell them I’m adding a dish to the menu. They will be thrilled. Go tell them. Tell them. And…please do not ever use dill again.”

Call of the White

The moon is in front of the window just outside the terrace door. Its glow coats the living room. The light wakes Bettina, it pulls her from her bed. Slowly, with reluctant waking eyes, she drifts from the bedroom and can see her living room lit with a white glow, as if she had left on a lamp. She follows the glow, walks through it, her feet rasping against the rough kilm rug, the window pulls her closer so she can see the full moon hanging, aiming its light directly through the window. A soft column of white reflects in the river below. It looks like a path leading to the moon, a direct route to the satellite orb.
Bettina goes out onto the terrace for a better view. Out there on the terrace the air is rich with the breath of trees, the scent of squirrels and skunks and raccoons.
What can be better than this, she wonders. How can the outdoor creatures be so lucky. Why do we humans stay inside? What can be gained by that?
It’s cold out on the terrace, but the white chilled light soothes her. She stands in the moon’s presence, in the open air, 8 floors up, engulfed with black night the way the birds do it and squirrels and skunks and night cats, face to face with the moon, enveloped by that narrow slip of atmosphere where breathing is allowed, held gingerly by gravity to the edge of the earth. The moon stands by. Silent. It doesn’t waste sound, suspended by movement and mysterious invisible matter, giving negative as much power as all positive, tangible presences.
Bettina sits down in the moonglow. She lets it drown her eyes, bathe them from back to front, stroke the lashes, splash her face, whoosh into the ears, drip into skin pores, meet with capillaries, douse organs, flush glands, permeate and encapsulate her. And her hair is teased and filled with moon, it energizes each follicle, shakes the skull, massages her brain.
It seems not so cold anymore. The moon can do that…make you feel like the only woman on earth, like the moon’s only date.

Back in bed, resting, finally, she closes her eyes and lets herself be still, feel still, and in the stillness, her body settles like an old house in the cool night after a day in the heat. Twitches snap here and there. The heel of her foot, her shoulder, a creak in her jaw, a fluttering thigh muscle. She feels herself coming to rest and letting her guard down, letting her bones sit so they can stop holding her up. Her muscles release letting their tension go. She imagines her impression on the mattress as it sinks deeper fully at rest. Her mind still moves though, still wheels and deals, still plans and anticipates, still ties in knots for the smallest things.

Bird Land

She sat near on a limb near the top of the tulip tree. Her thigh muscles clinging hard to the branch, her arms stretched upward, her hands clasping the branch above her head. She spoke rapidly and intensely as if in urgent prayer. But she was not alone in the tree. She spoke to someone else.
A catbird perched on a branch in front of her. She kept her eyes steady on the bird’s smooth gray feathers and dark black cap. Its shiny black eyes that looked up at hers, attentive and listening.
Bettina had always wanted to live in the trees. She’d watch flocks of sparrows settle in for night in a maple or cottonwood. Their voices bantering all at once. She wished she could be in their society. Wished they would let her in and accept her within their tree. She knew her size would not work for that. So she wished she could actually be one of them.
The catbird who listened to her now had gotten used to her monologues and probably listened more out of politeness than wanting to hear. Because Bettina almost always talked about the same things. She always told him her most ardent wishes. Her fascination with the past. Not her past, but farther back, the past of the human, the past before the human created farms and tamed some animals. The past before the humans left the forest and the savannas. And she spoke of Enrique. She could never be sure if she’d ever see him again.
The catbird listened. Half listened. He knew the old stories. This human who was not happy with her own kind. Or her own time. It made him suspect that the large head this human creature had caused her pain in ways he will never understand. He sensed too that it didn’t matter if he didn’t know what to do with her confessions. She just wanted to say them. But today, on this day, a foreign thought came into the bird’s brain. Something he had never seen before. Words that made shapes in his head. As if her confessions had taught him to understand what is human. His thought was clear and singular. It had one message. A message that Bettina may want to hear, because it was about her.
Bettina spoke to the bird in a kind of fit or trance. But she knew who she was talking to. She spoke to many animals but not all of them stood still enough to hear. She hoped by telling the catbird her dreams and worries she could somehow break through and be understood. To hear answers without sound. To feel feathers against her cheek even as the bird stood still before her
She paused in her speech.
The bird flicked its head up and down. It jumped and turned on the branch giving Bettina his back. Then jumped and turned again to face her. He opened his beak and squawked his call, the sound of a cat whining. Bettina watched him sensing something coming for her. He was quiet for a moment and then a long trill of music came from him. A high pitched looping tune unlike anything a catbird had ever said before.
Bettina’s eyes widened. She felt her brain twisting and bending trying to fit this song into something she could understand.  Mashing it between cerebral folds, forcing it to be accepted, to work through her system to come out as something known.
The catbird repeated the trill. And then again. And then again. And then Bettina dropped her head, her eyes closed, her brain knowing something now. The bird became silent. She lifted her head and opened her tearful eyes and nodded to him. He meowed and then looked down and dropped off the tree branch, taking flight into the shrubbery, disappearing into the ground cover.
“I’ll go. I know it’s time to go.”
This time she spoke to the tree. There is no way of knowing if a tree is listening. It has so much it must hear. In one swift motion Bettina jumped down landing on the ground with a sure thump of her feet. And then stood up on the ground as erect as a good human can be.

We Need Some More Kindling

Through the night. Even when the planets are out. Saturn and Venus. We still need more kindling. Is that an airplane flashing a headlight against the black? Or a moving star coming closer, daring to steal a better look…?

It’s Hot in Here

Bettina uses the brick oven even in the summertime. The heat wraps you in a sweat even though the kitchen is in the basement hidden from the sun. A film of stickiness covers Franny’s face as she mashes anchovy sauce with a mortar and pestal. Bettina doesn’t sweat. Even with her wild mane of hair swirling around her neck and stretching up toward the ceiling in curling tendrils like a sweet pea vine grabbing for a bit of fence. Bettina cooly chats on the phone with a mystery caller. The same one who calls every night. Franny knows it’s the same one because Bettina says the same things.

“Oui, oui , oui! …But no! I live here now. Si, si…je ne sais pas…ma dai!”

Franny only speaks one language but she knows three languages when she hears it. She got an “F” in French in high school and didn’t even try taking a language in college. She left college after one year. Failing. But culinary school let her in. She’s not very good at that either.

“Franny! That’s enough. We don’t want our guests to drink the garum, only to put it on the lamb. Time to twist the bread dough. Bring it here. I show you how to do it.”

She says “it” like “eet.” Franny prays that Bettina won’t notice how bad she is at all this. This internship makes her feel legitimate. Eases the struggle of class everyday. When she makes the broccoli soup too watery at school, at least she can come here and sweep the floor properly.

“You are a dough person. I can see that even if you cannot. Don’t be afraid of dough. It is just like you. Alive and fresh.”
She pulls off a piece from the mass of dough that overflows a large ceramic bowl and hands Franny a cantaloupe-sized portion.
“This piece you take home to keep. Use it like a pillow tonight, sleep into it, get to know it.”

She plops the dough in Franny’s hands. The cool flesh of the bread goo soothes her palms. She gives it a little squeeze. It squeezes back. Franny smiles in surprise.
“Yes,” Bettina says. “You can make friends with bread while it is new like this, while it is still a baby.”

Stalactite Drips in the Kitchen

A chronic drip. Right over the marble work table, just above Franny’s head, but curiously not dripping on her. Just dripping when she steps away. It’s only a leak. A leak into this basement kitchen. This subterranean labyrinth right in the middle of the city where Bettina (known by a more colorful name) keeps the flames in the hearth burning. Franny is only an intern but already she’s lost. The drip unnerves her, but her boss, her leader, the one with the burning eyes and the flying red hair, likes it. She depends on the drip. She’s growing it into a stalactite. Part of the transformation when the kitchen becomes a cave and her cooking becomes as old as the first glimpse of fire.