Tomorrow is the first of March.
*
Hydration
Dominic is sick. It’s not flu. I mean, it can’t be; we haven’t gone out. Literally the whole point of staying in like this has been to avoid exposure. It also can’t be anything else you’d catch. We thought at first possibly it was food poisoning, but no one else is sick and we’ve all been eating the same food. According to Dr. Google, who admittedly is sort of a specialist in worst-case scenarios, it’s either diverticulitis or appendicitis. Or a kidney stone.
Obviously, going in to a doctor’s office is not on the table. We did a phone consultation. The guy we talked to said that yes, it could be any of those things and offered to call in a prescription for Augmentin if we could find a pharmacy that had it. The problem is, even though H5N1 is a virus and antibiotics won’t do anything for it, there are a lot of people who didn’t believe this and some of them had doctors willing to prescribe whatever they were asking for and the upshot is, all our pharmacies are out of almost everything. Oh, plus a bunch of pharmacies got robbed, though mostly that was for pain meds. Pharmacies are as much of a mess as anything else, is what I’m saying.
I’m not giving up, because in addition to the pharmacies that answered the phone and said they didn’t have any, there were a ton where no one even picked up. I’m going to keep trying. In the meantime, we’re keeping Dominic hydrated and hoping for the best. I always keep a couple of bottles of Pedialyte around, because the last thing you want to do when you’re puking is drive to the store, and that stuff’s gross enough that no one’s tried to get me to pop it open for dessert. So I’ve got it chilled and he’s trying to drink sips.
If it’s a kidney stone, Augmentin won’t do anything, but eventually he’ll pass the stone and recover, although it’ll really suck in the meantime. (I wish we had some stronger pain medication than Tylenol. For real, no one has Vicodin right now. Not a single pharmacy.) If it’s appendicitis, there’s a 75% chance that the Augmentin will fix it. (This is new! Well, I mean, it’s new information. There was a study on treating appendicitis with antibiotics and 75% of cases are a type of appendicitis that won’t rupture and can be treated with antibiotics! And if you get a CT scan they can tell whether that’s the kind you’ve got, but, well.) If it’s diverticulitis, and he can keep down fluids, the antibiotics should help. If he’s got the worse kind, and can’t keep down fluids, they would normally hospitalize him for IV antibiotics and maybe do surgery. But again, not an option.
Oh, it could also be cancer. (Thanks, Dr. Google!) In which case there’s no point worrying about it until the epidemic is over.
*
Cream of Augmentin
I got an e-mail from someone who has Augmentin they’re willing to sell me. Or at least they say it’s Augmentin. I guess I’d have to trust them, which is maybe a questionable decision. They want $1,000 for the bottle, cash only. Dominic was appalled that I’d even consider this. He thought it was a scam, and they were planning to just steal the cash.
Fortunately I also got through to a pharmacy that still had it, a little neighborhood place. Dominic’s doctor called in the prescription, and I gave them my credit card number over the phone, and they actually delivered it. While I was on the phone with them they listed out some other things they have in stock and in addition to the Augmentin we got toothpaste and a big stack of last month’s magazines. Shout out to St. Paul Corner Drug: we are going to get every prescription from you for the rest of our natural lives.
I was hoping that starting the Augmentin would make Dominic at least a little better right away, but instead he’s getting worse.
Possibly this is just a reaction to the Augmentin. It’s not as bad as some antibiotics, but it can definitely upset your stomach, which is pretty counterproductive when puking and stomach pain are your major symptoms.
I had appendicitis when I was a teenager. I spent a day throwing up, and when I got worse instead of better my mother took me to the emergency room. I wound up having surgery. Afterwards I was restricted to clear liquids for a while, just broth and Jell-O and tea, which I got really tired of before they let me back on solid food. My mother smuggled in homemade chicken stock for me in a Thermos—it was still a clear liquid, but at least it was the homemade kind, the healing kind.
If I could pull a live, clucking chicken out of my ass, like I joked about, I would wring its neck and turn it into stock right now for Dominic. Nothing’s staying down, did I mention that? Nothing. But it’s not like we have anything for him other than Pedialyte.
I’m going to try to catch a rabbit.
*
Rabbit Soup
You guys, you really can find instructions for just about anything online. Okay, I’ve never looked to see if there’s a YouTube video on how to commit the perfect crime, but trapping an animal? Well, among other things, it turns out that the cartoon-style box-leaned-up-against-a-stick-with-bait-underneath is totally a thing you can actually do, but then you’ve got a live animal and if you’re planning to eat it you’ll still need to kill it. I wound up making a wire snare using instructions I found online in the hopes that the snare would do the dirty work for me. And it did. More or less. I’ll spare you the details, other than to say, rabbits can scream.
You can also find instructions for gutting and skinning a rabbit online. I used my kitchen shears for some of this, and I worked outside so that Jo didn’t have to watch. My back yard now looks like a murder scene, by the way, and my fingers were so cold by the end I couldn’t feel them. I feel like I ought to use the fur for something but I don’t think Home Taxidermy is the sort of craft that’s going to keep the pack of pre-teens cheerfully occupied. (Right now they’re reading through all the magazines we got from the pharmacy and I’m pretending not to notice that one of them is Cosmo.)
Back inside I browned the rabbit in the oven, since roasted chicken bones make for much tastier stock than just raw chicken, and then I covered it in just enough water to cover and simmered it for six hours. This would be better stock if I had an onion or some carrots or even some onion or carrot peelings, but we make do. The meat came off the bones, and I took out the meat and chopped it up and put it in the fridge for later, and I boiled the bones for a bit longer and then added a little bit of salt.
The secret to good stock, by the way, is to put in just enough water to cover the bones, and to cook it at a low temperature for a very long time. So there wasn’t a whole lot of stock, in the end: just one big mug full.
The kids have been staying downstairs, trying to keep out of Dominic’s way. Jo and Monika made dinner for the rest of us last night (rice and breakfast sausages) so I could take care of him. I saw Jo watching me while I carried up the mug of soup, though.
The bedroom doesn’t smell very pleasant at the moment—sweat, vomit, and cucumber-scented cleaner from Target. It’s too cold to open the windows, even just for a little while.
Dominic didn’t want it. I’d been making him sip Pedialyte but mostly he was just throwing it up again, and he was dehydrated. I pulled up a stool and sat by the edge of his bed with a spoon and told him he had to have a spoonful. So he swallowed that, and I waited to see if it stayed down, or came back up. It stayed down.
Two minutes later I gave him another spoonful. That stayed down, too.
This is how you rehydrate a little kid, by the way: one teaspoonful every two minutes. It takes a long time to get a mug into someone if you’re going a teaspoon at a time, but eventually the whole mug was gone. The Augmentin stayed down, too.
I went downstairs and set another snare in the back yard.
*
Something Decadent
So, thank you everyone who donated to Melissa’s fundraiser. I put all the names in the hat and drew out Jessie from Boston, Massachusetts, and she says she doesn’t want me to wait until everything is over, she wants a recipe now. And her request was, “Make something decadent. Whatever you’ve got that can be decadent.” And Dominic is suffic
iently recovered today that he can eat something decadent and not regret it horribly within ten minutes, so let’s do this thing.
We still have no milk, no cream, no eggs. I used the frozen whipped topping for the ambrosia salad and the marshmallows for the rice krispie treats (which aren’t exactly decadent, anyway).
But! Let’s talk about coconut milk. If you open a can of coconut milk without shaking it up, you’ll find this gloppy almost-solid stuff clinging to the sides of the can; that’s coconut cream. You can chill it, and whip it, and it turns into something like whipped cream. We set aside the coconut cream from three of the cans and chilled it.
I had no baking cocoa, because we used it all up a while back on a not-terribly-successful attempt at making hot chocolate, but I did have some mini Hershey bars still, so I melted the dark chocolate ones and cooled it, and thinned that out with just a tiny bit of the reserved coconut milk. It wasn’t a ton of chocolate, just so you know—it’s been a bit of a fight to keep people from just scarfing that candy straight down. But we had a little.
Then I whipped the coconut cream until it was very thick and almost stiff, and then mixed in the dark chocolate and a little bit of extra sugar, and it turned into this coconut-chocolate mousse.
When eating decadent food, presentation counts for a lot. We used some beautiful china teacups that I got from my great-grandmother: I scooped coconut-chocolate mousse into eight of them, and then I took the last of the milk chocolate mini bars and grated them with a little hand grater to put chocolate shavings on top. We also had some sparkly purple sprinkles up with the cake decorations so I put just a tiny pinch of that onto each cup. And I opened one of the cans of mandarin oranges and each of the mousse cups got two little orange wedges.
And I tied a ribbon around the handles of each teacup.
And then we set the table with the tablecloth and the nice china and we ate our Stone Soup of the day by candlelight and then I brought out the mousse and everyone ate theirs and then licked out the cups.
Some days it’s hard to imagine that this will ever be over, that we’ll ever be able to get things back to normal at all. When everyone is sniping at each other it feels like you’ve always been trapped in the middle of a half-dozen bickering children and always will be. When you’re in the midst of grief, it’s hard to imagine spring ever coming.
But Dominic pulled through, and Leo didn’t get sick. And tying the ribbons around the handles, I knew: this will all come to an end. We’ll survive this, and everyone will go home. I’m going to miss them, I thought, this pack of other people’s children I’ve crammed into my bungalow.
“Can I keep the ribbon?” Jo asked, when she was done with her mousse.
I told her, of course she could. And then she and Monika started arguing over whether she could have Monika’s ribbon, too, because of course they did, and that was our day, I guess, in a nutshell.
xxoo, Natalie
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the Wyrdsmiths, past and present:
Eleanor Arnason
Kelly Barnhill
Rachel Gold
Bill Henry
Doug Hulick
Ralph Krantz
Harry LeBlanc
Kate Leith
Theo Lorenz
Kelly McCullough
Lyda Morehouse
Sean Michael Murphy
Rosalind Nelson
Adam Stemple
I joined the Wyrdsmiths writing group in 1997. For twenty years, I’ve met people at a coffee shop every two weeks (or so) to share story critiques, industry gossip, pep talks, and friendship. Every story in this collection was read by the Wyrdsmiths and rewritten based on their feedback before it was submitted anywhere. I would not be the writer I am without my fellow writers; I would not be the person I am without these friendships.
When I was feeling particularly dispirited about my writing career and chances of seeing publication again, Lyda suggested that I have her submit my short stories. Her faith in my stories kept me writing.
Thanks also to my patient editor, Patrick Swenson; my excellent agent, Martha Millard; and all the many editors who published these stories in their magazines. Finally, many many thanks to my husband, Ed Burke, and my daughters, Molly and Kiera Burke for their love and support.
PUBLICATION NOTES
“Cat Pictures Please” originally appeared in Clarkesworld, © January 2015. |“Ace of Spades” appears here for the first time, © 2017. | “The Golem” originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy, © December 2000. | “Wind” originally appeared in Apex, © April 2015. | “In the Witch’s Garden” originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy, © October 2002. | “What Happened at Blessing Creek” originally appeared in Intergalactic Medicine Show, © August 2011. | “Cleanout” originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, © November/December 2015. | “Artifice” originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, © September 2014. | “Perfection” appears here for the first time, © 2017. | “The Good Son” originally appeared in Jim Baen’s Universe, © February 2009. | “Scrap Dragon” originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, © January/February 2012. | “Comrade Grandmother” originally appeared in Strange Horizons, © September 2002. | “Isabella’s Garden” originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy, © August 2011. | “Bits” originally appeared in Clarkesworld, © October 2013. | “Honest Man” originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy, © October 2007. | “The Wall” originally appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, © April/May 2013. | “So Much Cooking” originally appeared in Clarkesworld, © November 2015. |
About the Author
Naomi Kritzer is a science fiction and fantasy writer living in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her 2015 short story “Cat Pictures Please” was a Locus Award and Hugo Award winner, and was nominated for a Nebula Award. Since 1999, Kritzer has published a number of short stories and several novels, including two trilogies.
Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories Page 31
