In Minnesota after a funeral, there’s usually lunch in a church basement and there’s often this dish called ambrosia salad. (Maybe other states have this? I haven’t been to very many funerals outside Minnesota.) I was missing some of the ingredients, but I did have lime Jell-O and mini-marshmallows and even a pack of frozen non-dairy topping and I used canned mandarin oranges instead of the crushed pineapple, and mixed all together that worked pretty well. We had ambrosia salad and breakfast sausages for lunch. (I don’t know why we got so many packs of breakfast sausages, but it’s food, and everyone likes them, so we’ve been eating them almost every day, mostly not for breakfast.)
Monika asked if she could save her share of the ambrosia salad in the fridge until tomorrow, because she really likes it, and she didn’t feel like eating, and didn’t want anyone else to eat her share. (Which was a legitimate worry.) I put it in a container and wrote MONIKA’S, NO ONE ELSE TOUCH ON PAIN OF BEING FED TO THE RAT in sharpie on the lid. Which made her laugh, a little. I guess that’s good.
Jo sat through the service and ate her lunch and didn’t say a word. Mostly she looks like she doesn’t really believe it.
Stone Soup
Arie informed me today that the thing I called “Miscellaneous Soup” is actually called “Stone Soup,” after a folk story where three hungry strangers trick villagers into feeding them. In the story they announce that they’re going to make soup for everyone out of a rock, and when curious villagers come to check out what they’re doing, say that the soup would be better with a carrot or two…and an onion…and maybe some potatoes…and some beans… and one villager brings potatoes, and another one brings an onion, and in the end, there’s a lovely pot of soup for everyone.
I started to point out that I wasn’t tricking anybody, all this stuff was in my cabinet already, but then I realized that I didn’t just have dinner but an activity and all the kids came into the kitchen and acted out the story with little Tom playing the hungry stranger trying to get everyone to chip in for the soup and then throwing each item into the pot.
Then they all made cookies, while I watched, using mayo for the eggs and dicing up mini candy bars for the chips.
It was a sunny day today — cold, but really sunny — and we spread out a picnic cloth and ate in the living room, Stone Soup and chocolate chip cookies and everyone went around in a circle and said the thing they were most looking forward to doing when this was over. Monika said she wanted to be able to take an hour-long shower (everyone’s limited to seven minutes or we run out of hot water). Dominic said he wanted to go to the library. I said I wanted to bake a chocolate soufflé. Everyone complained about that and said it couldn’t be cooking or baking, so I said I wanted to go see a movie, in a theater, something funny, and eat popcorn.
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 h4N1 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 Jessi 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 sufficiently 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 krispy 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
* * *
Naomi Kritzer’s short stories have appeared in nearly every major science fiction and fantasy magazine, including Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Clarkesworld. Her short story “Cat Pictures Please” won the 2016 Hugo and Locus Awards and was nominated for the Nebula Award. She also had five fantasy novels published by Bantam in the early 2000s. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her spouse, two kids, and (currently) three cats. You can find her at naomikritzer.com or on Twitter as @naomikritzer.
The Deepwater Bride
By Tamsyn Muir
In the time of our crawling Night Lord’s ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, I turned sixteen and received Barbie’s Dream Car. Aunt Mar had bought it for a quarter and crammed fun-sized Snickers bars in the trunk. Frankly, I was touched she’d remembered.
That was the summer Jamison Pond became wreathed in caution tape. Deep-sea hagfish were washing ashore. Home with Mar, the pond was my haunt; it was a nice place to read. This habit was banned when the sagging antlers of anglerfish illicia joined the hagfish. The Department of Fisheries blamed global warming.
Come the weekend, gulpers and vampire squid putrefied with the rest, and the Department was nonplussed. Global warming did not a vampire squid produce. I could have told them what it all meant, but then, I was a Blake.
“There’s an omen at Jamison Pond,” I told Mar.
My aunt was chain-smoking over the stovetop when I got home. “Eggs for dinner,” she said, then, reflectively: “What kind of omen, kid?”
“Amassed dead. Salt into fresh water. The eldritch presence of the Department of Fisheries—”
Mar hastily stubbed out her cigarette on the toaster. “Christ! Stop yapping and go get the heatherback candles.”
We ate scrambled eggs in the dim light of heatherback candles, which smelled strongly of salt. I spread out our journals while we ate, and for once Mar didn’t complain; Blakes went by instinct and collective memory to augur, but the records were a familial chef d’oeuvre. They helped where instinct failed, usually.
We’d left tribute on the porch. Pebbles arranged in an Unforgivable Shape around a can of tuna. My aunt had argued against the can of tuna, but I’d felt a sign of mummification and preserved death would be auspicious. I was right.
“Presence o
f fish en masse indicates the deepest of our quintuple Great Lords,” I said, squinting over notes hundreds of Blakes past had scrawled. “Continuous appearance over days… plague? Presence? What is that word? I hope it’s both. We ought to be the generation who digitizes — I can reference better on my Kindle.”
“A deep omen isn’t fun, Hester,” said Mar, violently rearranging her eggs. “A deep omen seven hundred feet above sea level is some horseshit. What have I always said?”
“Not to say anything to Child Protective Services,” I said, “and that they faked the Moon landing.”
“Hester, you — “
We recited her shibboleth in tandem: “You don’t outrun fate,” and she looked settled, if dissatisfied.
The eggs weren’t great. My aunt was a competent cook, if skewed for nicotine-blasted taste buds, but tonight everything was rubbery and overdone. I’d never known her so rattled, nor to cook eggs so terrible.
I said, “‘Fun’ was an unfair word.”
“Don’t get complacent, then,” she said, “when you’re a teenage seer who thinks she’s slightly hotter shit than she is.” I wasn’t offended. It was just incorrect. “Sea-spawn’s no joke. If we’re getting deep omens here — well, that’s specific, kid! Reappearance of the underdeep at noon, continuously, that’s a herald. I wish you weren’t here.”
My stomach clenched, but I raised one eyebrow like I’d taught myself in the mirror. “Surely you don’t think I should go home.”
“It wouldn’t be unwise—” Mar held up a finger to halt my protest, “— but what’s done is done is done. Something’s coming. You won’t escape it by taking a bus to your mom’s.”
The Long List Anthology Volume 2 Page 20