by Susan Tepper
a Pure Slush eBook
Feast! Pure Slush Vol. 9
First published April 2015
Stories copyright © Pure Slush and individual authors
All rights reserved by the authors and publisher. Except for brief excerpts used for review or scholarly purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without express written consent of the publisher or the authors.
Pure Slush Books
4 Warburton Street
Magill SA 5072
Australia
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://pureslush.webs.com
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Front cover photograph copyright © Cécile Graat
Back cover photograph copyright © Ramzi Hashisho
Kindle ISBN: 978-1-925101-63-8
A note on differences in punctuation and spelling
Pure Slush proudly features (both online and in print) writers from all over the English-speaking world. Some speak and write English as their first language, while for others, it’s their second or third or even fourth language. Naturally, across all versions of English, there are differences in punctuation and spelling, and even in meaning. These differences are reflected in the stories Pure Slush publishes, and it accounts for any differences in punctuation, spelling and meaning found within these pages.
stories by
Paul Beckman
Claudia Bierschenk
Tom Fegan
Lyn Fowler
Desmond Fox
Gloria Garfunkel
Walter Giersbach
Kyle Hemmings
Gill Hoffs
Jonathan Levy
Cindy Matthews
AR Neal
Mandy Nicol
Matt Potter
Andrew Stancek
Susan Tepper
Michael Webb
Allan J. Wills
dedicated to
Consumpta Gorge
local tennis champion
and
dietitian with a secret
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
The Conceit of This Book
Few things bring people together more often and more joyously than food.
Though of course, things go wrong. The food is burned, spoiled, undercooked, overcooked, too raw, too meagre, too dry, too moist, too hot, tepid, cold, overly-generous, not set and too runny, too solid, too crusty, too crunchy, old-fashioned, poisonous and worse: served at the wrong time or in a chipped or cracked dish!
It can also be fragrant, delicious and life-giving, and a great symbol of culture and status.
And is there a greater sign of affection than food lovingly prepared?
We all need it, even if intravenously or in pill form, and we all have relationships with it … even if we’re not consuming any of it.
All stories in this book are set on the exact same day – Friday April 24th – and the book is structured so that each story is placed in correct international chronological order. The collection, in its page order, darts around the world as different characters experience food in their unique ways, often minutes apart, but all on the same day.
So it’s a true feast day! Happy gorging!
Matt Potter, Pure Slush editor and publisher
April 2015
Contents
Adam Gets a Rude Awakening / Mandy Nicol
Every Meat This City Has to Offer / Desmond Fox
Departure / Allan J. Wills
Dog Shit / Desmond Fox
Family Catch-up / Matt Potter
Adam Gets Humble Pie / Mandy Nicol
Before Sunrise / Lyn Fowler
Poetry for Dummies / Matt Potter
6.00am Feed / Claudia Bierschenk
Café Tiffany’s / Allan J. Wills
Tripe Soup / Andrew Stancek
Talisman / Allan J. Wills
Emergency Dash / Matt Potter
Homegoing Day – Morning / AR Neal
Adam Gets a Raw Deal / Mandy Nicol
11.00am Feed / Claudia Bierschenk
Breakfast with Mandy / Paul Beckman
Bryndzové Halušky / Andrew Stancek
A Dash of Pepper / Tom Fegan
Neon Pink Sign / Cindy Matthews
Marida / Lyn Fowler
Breakfast / Gloria Garfunkel
Bread and Butter / Susan Tepper
Breaking Eggs and … / Walter Giersbach
Eating Disorder / Gloria Garfunkel
The Mortician’s Visit / AR Neal
Kit and Czarina / Kyle Hemmings
Tea for Two / Gill Hoffs
Huge / Michael Webb
Clock Watching / Gloria Garfunkel
Tea for One / Gill Hoffs
Cloistered / Cindy Matthews
Poison / Gloria Garfunkel
6.00pm Feed / Claudia Bierschenk
Bread and Peanut Butter / Susan Tepper
Lunch / Gloria Garfunkel
Kit and Dasha / Kyle Hemmings
Lunch on the Run with Eggroll / Walter Giersbach
Al’s Kitchen / Jonathan Levy
Two Plus One for Tea / Gill Hoffs
Kapustnica / Andrew Stancek
Hundreds / Lyn Fowler
Two and a Leaner / Paul Beckman
In Between a Sandwich / Tom Fegan
Slice of Life / Jonathan Levy
After-Service Luncheon / AR Neal
Fabric / Michael Webb
Snack / Gloria Garfunkel
Birthday Dinner / Paul Beckman
Smart / Michael Webb
Bread without Crusts / Susan Tepper
Legs Like Stilts / Cindy Matthews
Blood and Soil / Desmond Fox
Dinner / Gloria Garfunkel
A Cold Dinner / Kyle Hemmings
Weight Watching / Gloria Garfunkel
Dinner and Call It a Night / Walter Giersbach
The New Czarina / Kyle Hemmings
Food for Thought / Tom Fegan
Howard and Maggie / Jonathan Levy
Mothra / Gloria Garfunkel
Authors
7.20am
Geelong, Victoria, Australia
Adam Gets a Rude Awakening
by Mandy Nicol
Adam wakes to the whiz of the juicer. He groans, buries his head under the pillow, clamps it against his ears. The vzzzzz cuts straight through the orthopaedic natural latex foam rubber and pierces Adam’s head somewhere behind his right eye. Adam slides out of bed.
He shuffles to the kitchen, yawning, and is greeted by his mother. She curls an arm around his head, kisses his forehead and hands him a glass of purple. Adam ponders the glass. Blueberry? He sips. Not blueberry. He smacks his lips at the earthy taste. His mother leans protectively against the sink so he has no chance of tipping it down the drain. He sits on a kitchen stool.
“Beetroot?” he asks.
“Yes! Do you like it? It’s a glass full of goodness. Beetroot is another four-star superfood and, hang on.” She picks up her health food book, opens it to a page tagged with a neon-pink post-it note. “… here, listen, beetroot is a powerful blood cleanser and tonic, is good for the digestive system and liver, and has anticarcinogenic substances attributed to its red colouring.” She smacks the book shut and smiles. It’s a wide smile and Adam sees no trace of purple in or around his mother’s mouth.
“Did you drink any of this goodness Mum?”
She puts her book on the bench. “No, but I would have if I’d had more beetroot.”
“You can have half of mine,” Adam offers.
His mother gazes out the kitchen window, says quietly, “Please drink it, Adam.”
Adam takes a deep breath, closes his eyes and drinks the purple.
Now his mother can move from the sink.
She takes a plastic container out of the fridge and spoons fruit salad into two bowls. “Here, I’ll have breakfast with you.” She puts the bowls on the bench and sits next to him.
“Why is everything red?” Adam asks.
“It’s a red fruit salad.”
Adam swirls the salad around with his spoon, identifies strawberries, raspberries, grapes, watermelon, blood orange and pink grapefruit. An extension of the anti-cancer strategy, he thinks.
“Are you still planning to go to the beach today?”
Adam nods, manages to not roll his eyes to the ceiling.
“It’s hardly beach weather, Adam, I don’t understand why Jen can’t come here, I could make a nice lunch for us all. It would be a lot more comfortable.”
“Jen’s already made a picnic lunch and sand can be very comfortable. And it’s autumn, Mum, not the middle of winter. We’re not going swimming so you have nothing to worry about.”
Adam swallows the last piece of fruit and tips the bowl of juice into his open mouth. He smacks his lips together, enjoying the sweetness that has managed to revitalise his beetrooted taste buds. He takes his bowl to the sink, rinses it, returns to kiss his mother on the cheek. “Thanks for breakfast, Mum.”
His mother grabs his arm. “You won’t make it a long day, will you?”
“I’ll be home by tea time.” He wriggles his arm free before adding, “I’ll even bring Jen in to say a quick hello.”
“No, not a quick hello, bring her to tea! I’ll try out a new recipe.” She scurries across the kitchen to leaf through her health food book.
0.13am
Hasenheide Park, Berlin, Germany
Every Meat This City Has to Offer
by Desmond Fox
I slip out of the hole into the uneasy orange city night. A slaughter of smells hangs heavy over the sun-beaten grass; fat pink meat, burnt flesh, petrol fumes, beer urine: barbeque season in the park.
The grilling section is a featureless scarred patch; approach with caution. Caution is a struggle after a day of cloistered sweltering inactivity, now broken by the thrill of so many jagged, contradictory scents.
I love summer in the city.
After picking my way around the skirt of bush, I nose for the first odour to capture me. Ohh, what’s this? Where is it, where is it? Here a raw porkchop, last of the packet, still swathed in its broken crinkly wrapper, swimming in an acidic supermarket barbeque sauce. Tangy chomp chomp chomp. Such a delight: a delicious abstraction, meat devoid of its history. What a start.
Where next? A patch of lighter fluid. An empty crisp bag with a lick of salts and not too many spices. Shard of glass. Scattering of charcoal. A woollen garment with a sharp hint of perfume, a lower note of deodorant, and a trufflesque base note of staleness.
Next course: a sausage burnt on one side into stiffened rictus. Crunch. Satisfying resistance, and a contrast to the raw porkchop it squeezes from between my molars. Ironic how the food reaches the same exhausted state as the fuel used to cook it. The meat’s last suggestions of flavour are overridden by the carbonised hide and its funereal associations. Overcooking never escapes a narrative of tragedy.
Here sat a circle of people, all leaving their own particular bum notes, a zodiac of psychedelic foulness. But here an especially flatulental impregnation, with a metallic menstrual bite. This species harangues the nostrils; rhymeless, chaotic; overfermented grains, rotten vegetables or any glomeration of foreign spices. Such confusion: too much for one species.
Enough with the park.
7.00am
Perth, Western Australia, Australia
Departure
by Allan J. Wills
Every so often work takes me away from my family. It is honest work and it does no harm to anyone. Once in a while something of value to the greater good comes from it that seems to justify the effort of doing it. The only downside is going away from my family for four or five days, sometimes when everyone else is having a holiday long weekend. I have a little boy, just seventeen months, and he pines for me while I’m away.
On the morning of departure my little boy knows I’m going away, even when I pack my bag in the car the night before while he is asleep. I try to sneak out the door in the morning as on every other day when I work in the city office, but somehow he reads the clues in the body language between my wife and me.
“Dada, Dada!”
He clings to my legs, calling, and doesn’t let go unless I pick him up and carry him. Eventually he allows my wife to carry him, and we hug him between us then wave goodbye to each other in the driveway.
I breakfast in the city at my desk: coffee and crepes from a café around the corner. There are always a few things to do in the office before I depart on these trips, emails that can’t be ignored or deferred, confirmation of meetings with clients, so it’s usually about ten in the morning when I get on the road and away. That is just fine as the freeway traffic has abated by then and I can set the cruise control and listen to classical music on FM.
2.27am
from Hasenheide, behind Lidl, around a street Imbiss, towards Hermannplatz, Berlin, Germany
Dog Shit
by Desmond Fox
Two flies on an iron gate are watching a farmer herd his cattle. One says to the other, “It is astounding what people eat.”
The bitumen roadway is still sweating the day’s heat into the night air; an unusual sensation underfoot as I zigzag out of the park. Along here one is assaulted by the effluvia of dogs.
However deep one’s visceral contraction considering the dietary habits of humans and their commensurate discharges, the dog provokes a further retch. The house dog is a terminally confused mongrel, always quarrelling with one part of its nature, always searching for a middle rung in a ladder of brutality. The sad, irreconcilable, hopeless hybrid, equally dull and bombastic, is fully pronounced in the loathsome qualities of its ordure, of which I shall say no more.
Here is one of the park’s wire mesh bins. And conveniently outside of its skeletal grasp is a sweet little delicacy; a diaper filled tight with baby urine. Such hope and richness in one little package. Pastel pinks and blues. The overspill of innocence.
The evolving technology of refuse storage has altered the city’s dietary landscape. The emphasis is on security, which is a byproduct of fear. The ownership and responsib-ility regarding waste is resolved in these impervious, imperious, refusing bins that cover the exit of every supermarket and restaurant like defensive pillboxes.
Such nervousness over nothing, over what you’d rather be rid of, like a dog with full bowels holding on to project one last statement … for whom it may concern. Anyway, there is still plenty left to eat in this city, but not where it is collected.
There are these places where food is scattered in the night. The men who go to these centres become loud and disagreeable and throw away their meat having only chewed a few bites. I don’t like the sauces too much: coarse, too vinegary. Like parenting birds, they half-digest the food and then spew it up on the pavements for us. Splat splat splat. That’s not for me, but rodents see it as a delicacy.
Best to ignore people, don’t even look at them, be prepared for a quick shimmy if they decide to throw something, can’t expect people to change their instincts.
The city is sugar and fat, convenience and opportunity, and I wouldn’t swap it. I’m not going to give you any of that Country Mouse and City Mouse bullshit. Danger is part of the bargain. I could live a lot longer in the country. But the diet? Chasing those skinny ‘bio’ mice? Give me the fast life. Sugars and fats.
11.00am
hinterla
nd near Nimbin, New South Wales, Australia
Family Catch-up
by Matt Potter
“Grandma would die if she knew,” my cousin Eve says, shaking her frizzy dyed-red hair. She rolls the dough in her hands into a ball, and pops the ball onto the oven tray. “She would curl her tiny middle-class toes up and have a heart attack. She’s probably doing that just now, back in sleepy little old Adelaide, hey.”
