The Family Recipe
Drew Schoeneberg
To me, flash fiction, list forms, and parables have always seemed to be emblematic of larger stories. Fragments of lives lived, or the suggestion of a window through which a broader portrait can be glimpsed. If 'quilted' serves as the theme, then perhaps these can be thought of as the squares which compose the broader structure.
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I have been told by my mother, who believes herself to be a reliable source, that my abuela made a mean pozole once upon a time. I suppose she would know better than I would, but soup, somehow, does not seem to fit the memory of my grandmother. I remember her strong, with perfect posture and razor-sharp teeth, with love that came in the form of clipped-off rebukes and aborted reprimands. I do not remember her as tender and warm, as a balm to ward off the chill. If there had been any heat to her, it had been that of an open flame, ready and eager to scorch the untested.
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My mother also told me that the pozole was a tradition, passed down through the generations. I asked her why she was not the one to pass down this most sacred of torches. She said it was because she did not know how.
Still, even if it had hurt to try something new, I think it turned out as well as any of us can hope for when it comes to tradition. My pozole will never taste the same as my grandmother’s; I don’t know how it could, when I never got the chance to taste the sort of love that only comes in this form.
But mine, I think, will taste better.
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Step one: Dice the onions.
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Step two: Cry. Sob, scream, wail, do whatever it takes to get the stinging of your eyes to marinate, form their own stock, and pour out of you like so much spilled milk. There is a liquid sort of helplessness that overtakes you when you have done everything you can, and still, you cannot stop yourself from falling to pieces, blinded. Use that—the melancholy will flavor the onions, tangy and sweet.
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Step three: Seasoning. A good pozole is rich, both in color and in flavor, yellow as the sun and tasting like damp earth between your fingers at the beginning of spring. Spice, heat, depth… Whatever you think you should give it, add another half measure more. If you run out of salt, press your fingers, seed-hot with the remnants of your cut-up jalapeños, into your tear ducts to wrench out those last pitiful drops. There is a certain richness with this method that cannot be achieved through kosher means.
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Step four: Sauté until soft and fragrant, but keep close watch in case the onions wilt when you’re not looking. If you leave them against the fire too long, there’s no hope of saving them.
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Step five: Broth again, this time store-bought and packaged. Drown the onions, smother them with hominy and pork and vegetables until you have to squint to see their remains. Turn up the heat until the flames lick out from the bottom of your pot, questing for somewhere else to stamp their mark.
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Step six: Boil over.
Step seven: Simmer. Here is where it gets complicated, where practice makes perfect. Grab the pot with the bare skin of your hands; don’t mind how it burns, because the heat will settle low in your gut—a baptism by fire. Stretch yourself thin over the pot, cover askew, and hang there, face full of steam, until everything bleeds together and colors a craven yellow.
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And when you are done, if there is anything left of you to give, you might garnish your soup with a drop of you, sour and bright and sharp.
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It is not a warm dish. It is the kind you gulp down after hours in the freezing cold, burning your tongue and blistering the roof of your mouth. It is the best dish you will ever taste, though you will have to choke down every bite.
If it is not how my abuela would have done it, then so be it, but I think there is a little of that open flame in this version, too.
Roadkill Pilgrimage
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There is dust in my mouth and gasoline seeping into the edge of my jacket sleeve; it has been this way for days, it seems, but I only pulled out of my driveway a few hours ago. I know there’s a spare sweatshirt in my backpack, but if I take my eyes off the road, I might crash, though there’s no one else for miles and miles.
It’s not cold enough for long sleeves, not really, but I’ve always had bad circulation—inherited, the doctor tells me, though I wouldn’t know. We don’t talk about things like that in my family; being cold-blooded suits us, right up until it doesn’t.
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I check my GPS: two hours until I reach my destination, though it doesn’t really matter when I get there. It’s a McDonalds just outside of Phoenix, picked because of its distance, the hunger that I’m sure will bare its fangs soon, and not much else. I’d passed another one a couple of exits ago, but I hadn’t seen more than three in the whole four hours I’d been driving. It’s funny, I think, just how many of them there seem to be until I start looking.
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But that’s how life works, I guess. I’d been terribly cold last night, chilled even with blankets piled high, but now that I’ve been in the car for a while, my back damp and my legs sticking to the fake leather of the seat, I wish I could feel the telltale seize of a shiver slipping down my spine.
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I keep the radio off. I used to like road trips, back when I sat in the passenger seat, hands sticky and powdered a traffic-cone orange. Now they just seem like a good way to kill yourself. Everything seems like a good way to kill yourself, though, so it’s better to do in the desert, halfway between here and there. Nobody blames you if you die in the desert, your corpse stretched out with one hand toward a cactus, an oasis, a fountain of life.
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If you die in the city, body pointed toward the nearest coffee shop like a businessman’s compass, people call you a crackhead and rifle through your pockets for loose change.
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Not that I want to die, necessarily. I just know how easy it is, how fragile we are. I’m half a step from cracking apart like a dropped glass at any given moment; it’s embarrassing, but it’s just how I’m made. I have scars all over me, thin and pale and too soft to touch, and I can’t stop thinking about a deeper cut, a longer drop, a harder fall… Just a little more force, and I could have been dead thirty times over.
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The whitetail jumps in front of my car, and I don’t scream. I don’t even curse, really—the soft exhalation of my breath is too quiet for words. The tires screech like banshees as my foot hits the brake; it takes everything I have not to throw my hands up to cover my ears. Instead, I spin the wheel like I’m a damn race car driver.
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The back of the car spins out. Vomit blooms like a fungus at the back of my throat, sour and sharp.
The deer does not make it.
The funeral for the deer proceeds like it might have for any dead relative of mine, if we had ever taken the chance to mourn. I cannot bury it; it’s all I can do to drag it off the burning tar, my knuckles red where the heat had scorched them. My eyes are blurry with tears; they hang like dewdrops, fat and swollen, off my lashes until they mix with the red of the blood on my hands. My nose aches, then goes numb. It might have slammed against the wheel on impact, but I can’t quite remember.
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I don’t know the words you’re supposed to say when sending someone off. I don’t know whether the deer lived a good life. I don’t know if anyone can.
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I don’t want to die, but, like this deer, I have always already been dead.
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The jacket finally comes off, stuffed into the trunk like a murder victim and just as bloody. The AC is still on, and I can finally feel it blowing against my skin, reopening wounds that are already old.
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There’s no one around for miles, so I take my time putting a new destination into my GPS.
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I’m not really hungry anymore.
The Crow's Short Flight
Adults remember how easy it is to fall off the edge of a building, how quickly a person can shatter into cobblestone; they keep the secret locked behind their teeth. They tell their offspring to be careful, but they do not say why. They hope this will be enough to keep them safe in their feather beds, ignorant and full.
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But what of children with no adults in sight, their slender hands slipping into shadowed spaces, scrabbling for spare change? The high ground is for them alone; to anyone else, it is not worth seizing. Like crows, they count their coins with gleaming eyes geared toward the shine.
Wes is one such bird.
It’s taken half a week to gather this much. Her usual haunts have been exorcised by priests in blue, their heavy batons a call for repentance. At thirteen, she’s long since passed the age of forgiveness—the starburst scars on her knees and elbows, patterned like gravel, attest to that. Still, she circles new prey with the keen eye of a falcon, and it’s… It’s enough. It has to be.
There is no other option.
Shaking, muscles burning from overexertion and exhaustion, she clambers up to her best nesting place: the ledge of a church; a bell tower; a sanctuary without entrance. No one would think to find her up here; the bell itself is long out of use, and only a frame light enough to soar on a breeze could slip through the rusted doorways that lead to its peak.
This high, everything seems too small, like dollhouses she’s seen through shop windows. It’s hard to imagine anything less real; it’s hard to feel like there’s anything wrong with trying to survive.
Real people, she thinks, would turn out their pockets for her. They would understand what it is to starve enough to count bones through a fogged window of pale skin.
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Carefully, she counts her coins in a corvid fashion, her hands trembling, her heart sure. Enough for at least one meal, then two. Anything more than that is a windfall, in her book. She’ll keep it close anyway.
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One coin slips free of her sweaty grasp, though, squeezed too tight and skittering along the edge of the tower.
“Fuck!”
On protesting limbs, numb from overwork, Wes lunges forward, grasping for the difference between hunger and death, wingspan stretched to break its limits through desperation alone.
The sole of her well-worn shoe slides against slick stone, skidding without friction, without catching, until it too is flying.
Fewer than twenty coins hit the ground, not enough to make a sound that can be heard over a busy street.
In the sky above, an unkindness takes flight. The bones of this place have long since been picked clean.