I am a seeded fruit. I am a biscuit. I am a red devil’s food cake. I am a flan. I am a man with an icelolly. I am umami. I am ohhhhh mammi. I am good enough to eat. I am delicious inside myself. I am juicy, ripe, ready.
The berries are fuzzed over in the windowsill and I blow at them like it’s my birthday.
I eat the cereal and breathe out with such confidence the window fogs up in a halo.
I go to town and buy a five pack of invisible thongs.
Fishcakes-neé-soup
My Aunty - a different one, not the one with the apples - has both her surnames on her Facebook profile. The one she was born with, and the one she married into. Between the two, a née nestles. This word that tells us something has changed. A line in the sand that is crossed over.
Today, my soup becomes fishcake. Fishcake-née-soup. I drain it first – bits of celery, cabbage, beans. I shake them dry, give them a real rattle about, then I add another can of cannellini. Then tuna. Then egg. Then salt. I make more rye bread crumbs. I am drawing a line in the sand and the soup becomes round.
In a hot frying pan, they bloom before my eyes. Little babies in their bath. They hiss at me and spit, but I get it – growing pains are worth complaining about.
On a plate the three of them sit with mullered peppers, the last of the parmesan, (the tip of my thumb, shaven) and hot sauce. I eat them standing up without cutlery.
I want to sit in the dark on my sofa and eat a whole raspberry tart – part two
In a bowl, I stir apple cider vinegar into oat milk. It curdles, which is good for today – this is what I want. I want this because I don’t want to use the only egg I have left. I have plans for the egg later.
Away, to the side, I mix flour with thick, clay-like brown sugar. It falls out in lumps and I bully it into the bowl, pushing it around and pulling it apart. Then, olive oil goes in with the milk mixture. It looks like caramel in an instance and I swirl it into existence with a spatula I melted on my hob a few months ago.
I don’t know how many raspberries I picked, but I put them in just as evening comes. I am impatient and eat the first piece hot while trying to count each piece of fruit, but I’m not able to do it with my tongue. Partly because they've melted, and partly because my heart’s not in it – I can’t commit.
When I was a teenage girl, I wanted to be the sort of woman who could tie knots in cherry stems. I bought punnets of them at the weekly fruit market and practiced at the kitchen table – piling them by my plate, twisting my mouth around. Cherries were sexy, and I thought I was meant to be too.
Raspberries aren’t as sexy, but I eat this cake – slice after slice of it– in the dark on my sofa singing along to the sound of sex, more commonly known as Chet Baker. I do this and I think – this is pretty sexy.
Then an egg –
boiled for 4 and a half minutes and eaten with the wrong amount of pepper as the dogs stop barking.