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Chicken Pot Cobbler
By May Moorefield
Brandishing a freshly sharpened knife, Jenna licked her lips and inhaled silently. There’s no going back now, she told herself. Committed. Collected. Ready. Then, she exhaled: A flash of glinting steel. A sickening slice. And then… “Oh dear, not again.”
Jenna dropped the knife on the kitchen counter and studied her bleeding index finger. She had just barely nicked it, but the real wound ran more deeply: for weeks, she had been attempting to conquer the chicken pot pie, but something went wrong every time. Whether it was burning the roux, leaving the pie in the oven for too long, or accidentally cutting her finger (exhibit E, above), each mistake reminded her of one thing– she was a terrible cook.
Crestfallen, Jenna grabbed the knife, carried it to the sink, and began running hot, soapy water over it. She stared at her face in the blade, scrubbing and scrubbing until every speck had vanished from her metallic reflection.
Then, she saw something peculiar out of the corner of her eye: the mise en place was shaking, trembling like a pot of vigorously boiling water. Like a first breath. Carrots, celery, onions, peas– everything began shifting and rearranging until Jenna was standing face to face with a humanoid tower of vegetables, Giuseppe Arcimboldo style.
“GAHHH!” she shrieked, stumbling backward.
This is not happening. Maybe I inhaled some pesticides–I knew I should have used organic produce…
But no matter how many times she blinked or rubbed panicked circles into her eyes, the vegetable man remained parked in front of her. After a few heaving breaths she stuttered,
“What, er, who are you?”
“Come on Jenna, don’t you know the recipe by now?” the tower replied. “I’m the chicken pot pie you’ve been working so hard to make. My friends call me Reggie the Veggie though. Or, I guess I imagine that’s what they would call me if I actually had friends. The produce aisle definitely gets lonely sometimes, but I manage... ”
“Wha-wha-what are you doing here?
“You tell me. You’re the one who keeps bringing me back to this kitchen. I mean I’m not complaining, you’ve got some gorgeous tile work right there by the sink.”
As the vegetable man droned on, Jenna began to feel the color return to her face (this Reggie the Veggie seemed nice enough, and incredibly well-versed in interior design), and considered the situation: What was Reggie doing here? Why did she insist on making chicken pot pie instead of something simpler? It wasn’t some family recipe she felt compelled to master, or a skill to impress that coworker she had her eye on (he’s pescatarian anyway). Did she even like chicken pot pie? All she knew was that no matter how many times she tried, she couldn’t quite get the dish right. The feeling prickled the inside of her stomach with a poignant insistence, growling like spoiled milk or a rancid tenderloin.
But her thoughts were interrupted by an ear-splitting CLANG!, followed by Reggie’s squeaky voice: “Wow, you’ve got some pretty neat equipment in here! Is that a KitchenAid Pro 600™? IN COBALT BLUE?!”
He proceeded to inspect the device with the clumsy appraisal of a five-year-old on Christmas day, stubbing his grubby, nubby carrot fingers on the attachments and side-levers.
“Hey! Be careful over there, I spent eons trying to make that pie dough, and that mixer cost me weeks of extra shifts at William Sonoma.”
“And you’re complaining? I love that store! All of the pancake mixes and kitchen shears and over-priced coffee machines– it’s a housewife’s paradise,” said Reggie, throwing his hands up in a grand gesture.
Well, maybe not so grand. As the vegetable man’s arms shot through the air, his shallot-capped elbows hit the switches on the side of the mixer, moving the lever from a peaceful “2” to a frenzied “10”. The machine roared, spitting chunks of dough and spraying flour all over the counter as the paddle whirled feverishly around the bowl. By the time Jenna scrambled over and pushed the lever back into place, the damage had been done: the pie dough was now woefully overmixed and half its starting volume, certainly not enough to hold the filling.
Studying the mess in front of her, Jenna receded into the sharp thoughts brewing in her brain. Are you really surprised? Every other attempt ended in disaster, you’re just not cut out for the kitchen. All her life she’d punctuated her actions with automatic apologies and “I’m sorry”s, assuming whatever she had done would be unsatisfactorily underwhelming. But there was only one person who really thought that– Jenna. Even in first grade, when she and her classmates practiced cursive manuscript in Language Arts class. Everyone had workbooks filled with diagrams of the lettering and lines to trace the shapes on, and Jenna would spend hours painstakingly going over each one. Make the tittle above the “I” smaller. No, now it’s too small. Move the stem to the left. Shift the letter sideways, it needs to slant more. Over and over, these thoughts swarmed around her brain and banged into her forehead, pulsing and throbbing until all she could see was haphazard scrawls on the page, absent of sound or meaning.
Reggie, having stood back in rigid shock, slowly approached Jenna and whispered, “I’m so sorry Jenna. I’m such a klutz, and I know how hard you’ve been working on this.”
“It’s alright, it wasn’t going to work out anyway. I’m just not cut out for this.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. Why do you keep speaking like you’ve done something wrong?”
“I just seem to fail to do what others do so easily. Some people make perfect pot pies every day for a living, and I can’t even follow this simple recipe. I just want to feel like I am able to do something, and do it well.”
“Jenna, that recipe was written by some random dude on the internet with the username “chefdaddy289.” Do you really think he should have the final say on what constitutes a successful dish? The beauty of cooking is that you’re not supposed to get it right every time. All culinary creations are products of accidents and failures. Take crepes Suzette for example: famous for its caramelized orange flavor, this dish was born when a waiter accidentally set the original dessert on fire. And as clumsy and difficult to manage as I am, you continue to devote your time and passion into putting me together. So if nothing else, just know that I wouldn’t exist without you, and I am incredibly grateful to be here.”
With these words, a warm current washed over her face. She mattered to someone.
Nobody, much less a magical vegetable man, had ever made her feel so purposeful. Despite her failures, and perhaps even because of them, she was able to find a friend in a place where she never expected. Who cares if the recipe isn’t perfect? It was Jenna’s, her own, and that was all she really wanted. She knew what to do.
“I’m going to try this again,” Jenna began, “but there is one problem...”
“What?”
“I’m going to need those vegetables back.”
“Oh, right!” he exclaimed.
Then, as quickly as they had the first time, the mosaic of produce that formed the man’s body began quivering and disintegrating, until it finally collapsed in a heap on the counter. Jenna picked up the knife once more. Committed. Collected. Ready.
***
She opened the oven, slid the pan out, and braced herself. The crust had shattered and sunken into the mixture in various places, and the filling had oozed over the edges. But when she tasted it, a large grin erupted across her face. “I’ll name this one chicken pot cobbler.”
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Unaffrighted Innocence
“Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
***DISCLAIMER: This is a fictional short story, I do not condone the usage of guns in this setting***
“Please pass the peas, honey,” Ma asked gently.
Peeling my widened eyes away from the purple handprints on her neck, I shuffled to the freezer and grabbed a pouch of Green Giant™ sweet peas, family size. The bag was not completely chilled because we had just bought some new packs from the store 30 minutes earlier (my mom and I go through peas pretty quickly these days), but anything is better than nothing. I placed the bag in her shaking hands and listened to her sigh with the simultaneous pain and relief that comes when a cold object touches hot skin.
At four years old, I was all too familiar with our routine, our ritual of breaking and sighing and healing. She tried to explain that this is a normal thing that “all mommies and daddies do” and that Father James, the pastor at the church near our house, says parents stick together “till death do us part” because it is a part of “God’s natural plan.” I may have been young, but any living thing could detect that the dull crunch of Ma’s bones as my father twisted her and the sickly hues of purple spattered across her delicate features were far from “natural”. Nevertheless, Ma had a particular dexterity with makeup and excuses, concealing her bruises with foundation and dismissing her injuries as accidents at the gym.
In retrospect, I see that she hid her wounds to fit in with everyone else; her battered features would make her different, incompatible with the rest. It would frighten and drive them away, as if abuse were something contagious. But back then all my juvenile mind could see was lovely, caring Ma groaning and trembling with those damn peas on her face. I had tried telling other people myself, my small hands incessantly tugging on a person’s pant legs, but Ma quickly hustled me away and apologized for my disturbance. “That was terribly impolite of you, Leila.No well-raised child should go around bothering people like that.” So I stood back and restrained the cry for help swelling in my small chest, feeling the waves of frustration churn around in my stomach.
My solution arrived on a Sunday evening when Pa entered the house after a successful few hours of squirrel hunting (to relieve his bottomless aggression, I suppose). Carelessly, he tossed the rifle on the floor and stalked off in search of a Budweiser. I fixed my gaze on the gun’s sleek body and felt my footsteps head in that direction. “This is for Ma,” I told myself.
Glinting metal. Cold metal against my hot cheek. A careful click, boom, thud. Relief.
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Refugio’s Hair
“Refugio’s Hair” by Alberto Ríos
In the old days of our family,
My grandmother was a young woman
Whose hair was as long as the river.
She lived with her sisters on the ranch
La Calera--The Land of the Lime--
And her days were happy.
But her uncle Carlos lived there too,
Carlos whose soul had the edge of a knife.
One day, to teach her to ride a horse,
He made her climb on the fastest one,
Bareback, and sit there
As he held its long face in his arms.
And then he did the unspeakable deed
For which he would always be remembered:
He called for the handsome baby Pirrín
And he placed the child in her arms.
With that picture of a Madonna on horseback
He slapped the shank of the horse's rear leg.
The horse did what a horse must,
Racing full toward the bright horizon.
But first he ran under the álamo trees
To rid his back of this unfair weight:
This woman full of tears
And this baby full of love.
When they reached the trees and went under,
Her hair, which had trailed her,
Equal in its magnificence to the tail of the horse,
That hair rose up and flew into the branches
As if it were a thousand arms,
All of them trying to save her.
The horse ran off and left her,
The baby still in her arms,
The two of them hanging from her hair.
The baby looked only at her
And did not cry, so steady was her cradle.
Her sisters came running to save them.
But the hair would not let go.
From its fear it held on and had to be cut,
All of it, from her head.
From that day on, my grandmother
Wore her hair short like a scream,
But it was long like a river in her sleep.
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Envy
“Envy” by Yusef Komunyakaa
Icarus imitated the golden plover,
Drawn toward a blue folly
Above, looping through echoes
Of a boy’s prankish laughter,
Through an airy labyrinth
Of conjecture. A lifetime
Ahead of Daedalus, with noon sun
In his eyes, he outflew the bird’s
Equilibrium, wondering how this
Small creature of doubt braved
The briny trade winds. Surely,
In a fanfare of uneclipsed wings
Driven by dash & breathless style,
He could outdo the plover’s soars
& dares. But he couldn’t stop
Counting feathers against salty sky.
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She Fears the Beast
(inspired by “The Sleeping Gypsy”, the painting pictured below by Henri Rousseau, 1897)
“She Fears the Beast” by May Moorefield
Puffs of warm air roll down a sleeping neck,
The mighty pillar supporting her
consciousness,
where music dribbles out and drops
down
to
her
fingertips,
which normally rest on tight, harmonious strings,
but now clutch a gnarled stick.
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1/2 Cup of Companionship
“1/2 Cup of Companionship” by May Moorefield
Nebulous February encourages the shivering turnip bulbs with a clap of thunder.
I study the cracked paint on my cornflower kitchen cupboards.
Every night I admire the flashing steel of chef’s knives on television,
And find myself minced as I drive to Panda Express for my weekly ration of eggrolls.
Curious tendrils tunnel through the crumbled earth in muggy March.
My fingers toy with celery stalks patiently waiting on the spotless counter.
I am enraptured as Guy Fieri describes the flavor of every legume in thirteen-bean soup,
Craving something greater than the pixelated food that I marvel at.
Along comes stormy April, and roots clutch the soft dirt, mingling with the cordial worms.
I promptly drop my dripping raincoat on the floor and begin to unload a carefully selected collection of comestibles.
I marvel at Bobby Flay’s meticulously sliced mushrooms, attempting to mimic the see-saw of his Knife-strokes.
Even as I wrap the third bandage around my index finger, I feel victorious.
At last the turnip sprouts emerge to guzzle the May sun, feeding plump roots beneath the surface.
My practiced hand executes a chiffonade of fresh mint, and a zesty aroma capers throughout The corridors of my humble abode.
The prosaic television maintains its weeklong silence,
As I step into the garden to greet my rotund companion.
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An Ode to the Thimble
“An Ode to the Thimble” by May Moorefield
The thimble presides
With portly stature,
ensconced on a throne
Of woven wood.
In regal robes of pleated sublimity,
Our minute monarch sweeps his gaze
Across the resigned mahogany
Floorboards of his threadbare chamber.
Though his spirit has become tarnished
With prickly frustration and tailored neglect,
His silver dimples faithfully twinkle
In the glow of moonlight
Streaming through the transom
window.
Such isolation rips at the seams of his
Quilted kingdom.
Yet, this thimble thrives
As he presses against such needling emotions,
And softly mends the gaping holes
With chilling precision.
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welcome
I want to welcome you all to my writing blog! This is a space that I chose to place all of my content out into the world. Look around if you would like, depart if you prefer, this is just an open space where my words can breathe :)
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