-t, you've inspired me. Mine is a little long, but since noone's counting...

The Way the French Do It

“Let me show you how the French slice it.” My grandfather takes my fork and knife out of my 5-year-old hands and slices into the fried, egg-soaked bread that’s covered butter and syrup. Four times from top to bottom. He turns the plate and cuts again. Twenty-five perfect, bite sized pieces. When he finished, there was a piece on the fork. He popped the fork into his mouth as I laughed. "That one got stuck."

The morning after he died, I had French toast. Four times from top to bottom. Turn the plate. Four times again. The last piece stuck. I set it to the side, and ate the rest, leaving the first piece for grampa.

That's wonderful, Aimee. I'm enormously pleased to be associated with it in a small way.

Aw, jeez, Aimée, that's beautiful. But it got my allergies going something fierce.

Salt

I know there are people who attach certain foods to certain reactions. But I don't eat for comfort; comfort is about words, and touch. I eat for love, or to stay alive, or to revel in the sensory. Comfort, when needed, takes a different route.

Nearest thing is salt. I wake from nightmare, touch the tip of my tongue, featherlight, to the back of his neck, and taste sweat there as he sleeps. That bit of bitterness keeps me from drifting into my omnipresent terror that the man who slept in my heart before him took no comfort in me.

Crap, nearly missed this:

As I'm getting closer to completion, I keep feeling like everything is completely wrong, and when my editor gets it, he'll make me give the money back because it's ALL WRONG.

Does this happen to anyone else?

Considering I wrote the last 65K words of Cruel Sister while literally chanting "please don't let this SUCK" as a mantra under my breath? Because it made me stop working on the Kinkaids and I had no heart or attention left to put into it?

That would be, yes.

But it didn't suck. Neither does yours.

The smell is sweaty. It's onions and fat and chile. It's the burnt smell of flour and lard and a touch of salt, perhaps deposited in kneading the flour masa. Scalded iron skillet. It's hominy and tripe and pork fat. It's corn and lime and a sharp scolding in spanglish for picking at the sweet tamale filling of pecan and raisin and cinammon. It's the sweet of biscochos in the oven, anise, that I count on every year. It's the next door neighbor's kitchen, and it's never been home to a gringa whose parents can't make a decent tortilla, until now. And I miss that like I don't miss my mom's hotdish.

Oh, that's really nice, sarameg. I can really picture it. And yours is striking, deb. Good stuff.

alienation

I want to squeeze my eyes shut so tight they bleed. I want to rake my fingernails across a thousand chalkboards. I want to scream, to bite my tongue, to chew my lips.

But I can't.

I want to be able to touch people. I want them to look and see me. I want to speak and be understood, to be able to function.

But I can't.

So I ravage the cabinets to find something, anything, to do with my hands, my eyes, my mouth. So I eat, like desperate masturbation, to choke down the imperfection, to find some comfort.

Red Delicious

I remember being young and the beautiful apples grew all over our kingdom. I would walk out to the orchards and pull one, firm and ripe, off the lower branches. The peel as red as blood. The flesh as white as snow. No matter how bad things were, the orchards were my sanctuary.

I hated leaving the orchards I loved as a child. But I had to run. The men that have taken me in have no apples near our little cottage. It seemed like a dream when the kindly old woman came to the door, offering me such comfort.

Crikey, Liese. That's a chilling cry from the heart, or from the pit - I'm not sure which.

Aimee, that got me thinking about Adam and Eve, what comfort there might be for the two original apple-eaters, who exchanged ignorance for the wider world and a pissed-off deity with control issues hounding their descendents. If I wasn't in fullscale MS relapse right this moment, I'd go there - mangoes, maybe? Figs? Or the real thing, pomegranites?

Maybe the germ of the idea will ping someone with functional fingers and functional brain cells tonight.