Fiction by Pamela McCarthy
Presentation is important. Set the table with good dishware, with the silver placed just so, with the napkins folded. Maybe light a candle or two.
Who am I talking to? I guess I’m talking to you, ghosts.
Make something that won’t tax your resources and that will be delicious. What I mean is, use what you have on hand. Cut things evenly, add salt—always add some salt—add the spices and flavorings you want. Maybe cook with a little of the wine you were going to drink in the hopes it would lead you to where everyone is, where you can at least visit with them for a while.
This is why it’s important to buy the ingredients before things go to shit. Before you can’t get to the Indian grocery store and can’t get your hands on asafoetida. Well, I got the asafoetida a while ago, it’s been in my cupboard. Its stench is legendary, like death according to one vlogger, so when I sniffed it, I was disappointed. It smelled like onions to me. It still does. Old onions, I suppose, but …onions.
Where was I?
Make something that can accommodate the remaining chicken in your freezer. Something that will tie the past and present together. Something you would proudly serve to your family or friends, if they were here to eat it.
We won’t think about that.
Pour yourself a glass of wine while the chicken roasts in the marinade you prepared. The power could go out any minute. Pour yourself another glass of wine when it goes out just after you take it out of the oven. Toast the grid. The grid is dead, long live the grid.
After raising your glass, remember why you’re doing this. Why am I doing this? Well, we all do things like this for a reason, I’m sure you have your own. Maybe it’s to remember eating with your loved ones.
Look at the photographs of your family, your friends, the ones who can’t be here because there’s no safe passage any longer, the ones who can be here because they are ghosts. Remember that you have to eat what you’ve prepared. You are on your third glass of wine, you lush! Haha, I am hammered. Alone. Drinking alone was never on my bucket list, and it wasn’t anything I did before all…all this.
The chicken is good with the asafoetida. Resolve to use more of it in your cooking, then realize that the grid is sputtering in its death throes like everything else. You’re in a condo, one that’s been awfully quiet. Did everyone die? Wouldn’t there be a smell? Would it smell like the asafoetida?
I know I’m drunk. Here I am, giving instructions and advice on cooking to ghosts. If you pay attention, you can see them from the corner of your eye in the shadows thrown by the candles you lit for ambiance, but which are now for light.
Pamela McCarthy spends her days working in healthcare fundraising and her nights writing short fiction. When she is not working or writing, she is buying seeds for her garden, creating more garden space because she bought so many seeds, or reading.
