Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 31

by Edited by Kelly Link

  Following the completion (and my dance routine) I normally decide to eat the fennel after all. After that, I take stock of the weather. I ask myself, do I want to prepare it hot or cold? For the purposes of this column, I’ll do one of each.

  To use fennel cold, cut away everything but the white bulb at the bottom. From that, remove the solid core. Then slice the bulb very thinly against the grain.

  The simplest way to use fennel is to combine it with orange or tangerine segments, olive oil and salt and serve it alongside any piece of fish or any kind of teriyaki or British-style vindaloo. It can also replace celery in tuna salad or cole slaw. If you like you can finely chop some of the tender fronds at the end and sprinkle them on substances that you’d like to smell like fennel, such as green salads or fresh-cut tomatoes or that pungent dog who keeps hanging around the farm stand whom no one seems to own.

  But let’s say you want to make the kitchen hot by actually cooking your fennel. Here you have many options.

  You could cut the whole bulb, including the core, into wedges, roast it with olive oil, salt and pepper, top it with grated parmesan and serve it as a side. Again, taking celery as your model, you could add it to roasted root vegetables, stews. You could include the whole vegetable (including the long green stalks at the top) in vegetarian soup stock. My favorite way to eat fennel hot is cooked with tomatoes to form a sauce for pasta or a base for red beans & rice but it also combines well with carrots or curry (or both).

  And what about those long green stalks? If not used in floral arrangements or added to soup stock, or to perfume a stray, what would they be useful for? A unique garnish for a bloody mary springs immediately to mind. Or, you could do what I do—throw them in the compost.

  One of the realizations of the CSA is that much waste comes from butchering whole plants for consumption. Patrons of bags of frozen prepared veg at large grocery stores are generally spared the knowledge that most of the bodies of these organisms we call “crops” are either not edible or so unpleasant that they shouldn’t be considered dinner. So, I beg you, throw your carrot tops away (they are poisonous), peel the black spots off your organic potatoes (they are fungus), and pull your kale off its fibrous central stem (not technically harmful, just bitter and nasty). It does you no good to eat or serve vegetables rendered unpleasant by inadequate preparation, I swear.

  So let go. Supplicate yourself before the fan-dancing angel of the CSA and find peace in the knowledge that you’ve managed to think inside the box, for once in your life. And above all, eat your vegetables, always.

  The Curator

  Owen King

  D, following the coup d’etat, contrived to obtain a job at the National Occult Collection. Prior to the outbreak of hostilities, she had studied library science, and harbored besides a great interest in the afterlife, whether there was something. Her brother had died young, fourteen, of a blood-borne disease. (His final words quiet but clear: “Yes, I see you. Your—face.” Whose face? He’d been nothing if not secretive, her brother, forever slipping off with his slingshot and returning flushed and vague in response to their mother’s inquiries as to where he’d been. In her memory he wore his gray school suit, bowtie and cap, drawn low, so his cool eyes were shaded, the slingshot tucked into his belt at the hip.) So, D’s gentleman friend, a lieutenant in the revolutionary brigade, made a call. What he discovered, to her disappointment, was that the National Occult Collection had been destroyed in a fire. The very night of the coup the building’s boiler had exploded—or at least, that was the assumption. There had been a fire, anyway. In the citywide chaos the fire crews had been dispersed to several more important locations and the blaze ate itself alive long before anyone noticed, leaving nothing but a smoldering brick shell. However, her lieutenant explained, eyebrows lifting hopefully, the National Museum of the Worker, next door, yet stood, and whoever had been in charge there had abandoned the post with the rest of the government rats.

  D shrugged, said okay, and was summarily awarded the position of new head curator, and the keys to the building.

  A group of boys, loitering outside a shop on the opposite of the road, taunted them. “Oh, what a pretty baby!” one boy howled. D was carrying her cat doll. It wore an ivory nightgown. Her brother held her hand. He was twelve and D was six.

  D sniffed at tears. She did think her baby was pretty.

  The boys made cat sounds, hisses and growly screeches.

  “Never mind them,” her brother said quietly.

  D said it was hard, though. He promised it would get easier—and when they rounded the corner, and the calling soon faded to nothing, he was proved correct. This was an important lesson. Her brother loved her and her brother told the truth.

  A broad, red brick structure with pea green shutters and a tarnished steel door made of melted hammers, the National Museum of the Worker was second from the corner on a leafy street in the government district. Peen and hammerhead fragments jutted from the door’s surface like fingers and faces pushing up from under a sheet.

  To the left of the Museum, at the corner, lay the debris of the Occult Collection. Visible in the midst of a lean-to of charred, fallen beams was a tall, blackened rectangle that D immediately recognized from a pre-fire tour she had made of the Collection as a student. It was a closet belonging to a conjurer of the previous century known as “Salvador the Gentle.” D recalled the tour guide’s description of the conjurer’s trick: after selecting a female volunteer, the Gentle would withdraw with his new assistant into the closet; a few minutes would pass, and suddenly the conjurer would burst out again, but with the head of the woman atop his body and vice versa. While the audience roared in horrified delight an orchestra would strike up and the two abominations would perform an elegant waltz, he laying his head wistfully upon his own velvet-caped shoulder. At the conclusion of the song they would reenter the closet and shortly emerge again with their respective heads put right again. There were no photographs of the trick, of course, but according to contemporary reports, rival conjurers disapproved. They remarked, in one way or another, that the Gentle was playing with things he had no business playing with—and indeed, this proved to be the case when a series of his willing female volunteers turned out to be pregnant. “This is not my soul’s doing!” the conjurer protested. There must have been someone else in the closet, he claimed. The vengeful husband who shot the Gentle in the crotch and let him bleed to death on the rug of a gentleman’s club was not swayed by this excuse. D was intrigued, though. It occurred to her that, perhaps, the face her brother had glimpsed in the moments before his last breath belonged to that other soul.

  To the right of the Museum was the embassy of an imperialistic ally of the former government, the diplomats of which had fled during the coup.

  Together, D and her lieutenant went around the Museum building’s six floors, opening the windows and the shutters to air the museum’s capacious halls. Dusty light flooded the exhibitions, which ranged from working factory models to agricultural displays to examples of various kinds of printing presses. In the boiler room D’s lieutenant puzzled over the gauges and switches before shrugging and abruptly pulling a red lever. “Let’s just hope,” he said. D plugged her ears and told him, “If this is farewell, Lieutenant, I hope I’ll see you in the afterlife!” A clanking started up, and heat began to express from the radiators. “Yes!” D’s lieutenant shot his arms up as if he had scored a goal. He appeared starved inside his scarlet officer’s uniform, his body the same weedy university student’s body that it had been when the college closed the previous spring and the revolution broke out.

  “Wait.” Frowning, he dropped his arms. “I’m having dark thoughts. What if heaven is a museum that hasn’t been swept in a month?”

  “Lieutenant.” His name was Robert, but it amused her to address him by his rank. D shook her head in a regretful way. “You know very well that neither of u
s is going to heaven.”

  “Oh, right,” he said. “Then: maybe this is hell?”

  She pulled her dress over her head and threw it. A draft captured the thin flowered fabric, and sent it rattling across the basement, a frightened ghost, until it plastered itself across a crate, exorcised.

  “Okay, then. Definitely not hell, either,” said her lieutenant, stepping toward her.

  “Definitely not,” she said.

  D felt protective of her lieutenant; he was so puppyish, blathering on about boring holes through the economic strata and quenching the people’s thirst for knowledge with the run-off; about the committees being formed in every town and village across the countryside on female advancement and resource theory and efficient management; about the brigade’s artillery pressing the retreating government forces; about his dull-witted parents who meant well but couldn’t conceive of the world beyond the lawn of their quaint little inn and worried only that there would be a shortage of cheese; about the paintings and the bottles of wine and the blocks of currency that the prosecutors wheeled into the courts day-after-day, and how the ministry men in the docks, like plucked chickens without their wigs and sashes and medals, claimed never to have seen any of it. Color rose up in his cheeks and sweat gathered on his forehead, where the angry scars of his teenage acne glowed purple. In school, she had been the only one who called him Robert; his friends all called him Bobby. Maybe calling him Lieutenant was an effort to get as far away from that boy’s name as possible. It didn’t seem to make a difference. It was still so easy to picture him on a field with lines and squares painted in the grass, shouting and elbowing in the scrum around a ball. And this gestured toward the problem: as lovable as D found her lieutenant, he was a disappointing, often irritating lover

  They did it once in the basement, and a second time upstairs, where the sawmill exhibition had caught her lieutenant’s attention. Here, they positioned themselves on the chute that passed underneath the blade. For leverage D hung onto the crossbar that would have held the razor-sharp circular saw blade in a working mill, but in the exhibition contained only a large wooden washer. “What a show you’re putting on for them! They’re all waiting for their turn to grab you with their massive workers’ hands, their massive calloused mitts that will scrape you, and—” His lips were in her hair, and D could feel his smile, his satisfaction. Her lieutenant tried too hard; he talked about fucking her in a desert, about pounding her into the sand while coyotes watched and howled; he talked about fucking her on a flat rock in the middle of a river, and people on boats passing by, leering and groping themselves; he talked about fucking her in the street, fucking her before an audience at the opera, fucking her in a zoo cage for the amusement of tourists. None of it excited her. Maybe it would have if she thought it was something he actually fantasized about. D knew he wasn’t like that, though, that her lieutenant was too sweet and eager to be a real threat, sexual or otherwise. Her affection for him was grounded in his well-meaning nature, but so was the ambivalence she felt toward him when they were intimate.

  “Sick,” she said to him, which seemed to make the lieutenant happy. He cackled.

  There was a shout, cut off by a gunshot. D and her lieutenant lay on the cutting board under the roof of the model sawmill and listened. A minute or two, and a heavy door banged open at street-level.

  The lovers slipped off the slide and went on their knees to the nearest window. They peeked over the sill. From a rear door of the embassy emerged a massive, shirtless man, a man of the revolutionary brigade by the red uniform pants that he wore. Over his shoulder he toted a body-shaped object inside a canvas bag. It was early evening, light enough to discern stains on the canvas of the bag. A thick black beard ran down from under the soldier’s eyes to his Adam’s apple, beneath which a thin band of pale skin interrupted the river of hair before it spread into a pelt that covered his shoulders, chest, and torso. The soldier crossed the courtyard and dropped the object against the base of the stone retaining wall.

  D glanced at her lieutenant: his jaw was shifting around inside his closed mouth.

  The men who removed her brother’s corpse from their apartment took him out wrapped in the bedding. They wore gloves and handkerchiefs knotted over their mouths to guard against contagion.

  D watched from the doorway of the living room as they passed through with their burden. Her nurse, breathing fumes of gin, rested a hand on her shoulder, as if in comfort, but really, to keep from falling over.

  Her parents were already gone, to choose the coffin.

  The lovers dressed in silence. Her lieutenant spent a few minutes irritably scrubbing at a dark spot on the wooden slide, but the mark wouldn’t come away. She told him it was fine, and he said, “I know,” and announced that he had to be off. There was, he explained—sulkily, sounding a lot more like a Bobby than a lieutenant—a reapportionment committee he needed to attend.

  The last sun broke in shards off the tin roofs of the National Bank in the distance. As she locked the doors D had to hold a hand over her brow to keep from being blinded. When the bolt was settled and she turned to leave, the glare momentarily cleared. D stopped. The imperialist ally’s flag had been taken down from the pole that extended from wall of the embassy and a new one—solid black—had been run up. Through the fabric D could just discern the form of the sun, a coal on the verge of collapse. The bag that had lain by the courtyard wall was gone the next morning.

  A group of schoolchildren came to the museum conducted by a pretty young teacher named Miss Clarendon. D followed the instructions written on a note card in the slanting hand of a previous curator to turn on the model waterworks and the children took turns rotating the wheel, sending bits of kindling surfing down the model river. She wheeled around a mobile printing press, brought out paper and pencils, and set them to drawing pictures of the machine. Miss Clarendon circulated among the children, the sheet of auburn hair that fell down her back swaying lightly with her steps, and her arms crossed tightly over her chest. It surprised D, how quiet the children were, the only noise the scrape of pencil leads. “They’re so good,” she told the teacher. “They’re scared,” Miss Clarendon replied. “Why?” asked D. Her lieutenant had assured her that the combat was essentially over. The other woman blinked and laughed in a way that D didn’t like; it sounded less like a laugh and more like the nervous inhalation a person took to brace for a splinter being pulled. Miss Clarendon had wandered to the window. “I thought that was an embassy there,” she said, not turning, leaving D to respond to her shimmering hair.

  “They fled,” said D. She added, defensively, “They were aligned with the criminals,” and immediately regretted it, because for what reason did she have to be defensive? D was not a soldier or a revolutionary. She was a curator.

  “My fiancée is a—was a stenographer for the government—I mean, the criminals. He went there to record meetings sometimes—about trade agreements and mineral rights—shipping lanes and—and he’s been missing and I wondered if during the fighting . . .” The teacher touched the tips of her fingers to the windowsill, as if she feared it might be hot.

  “So you knew it was an embassy,” said D.

  “Yes,” said Miss Clarendon. The women stared at each other then. One of the children sighed, perhaps dissatisfied with his picture.

  “It’s not an embassy any more,” said D. “They do other things there now.”

  Miss Clarendon gathered the children. Several of them left behind their drawings of the printing press. In their crude renderings the printing press tended to resemble a spider, wide and rigid, body swimming with letters.

  “I am looking for stones like this one,” her brother explained, perhaps a year before the sickness took hold. He raised a smooth, egg-sized rock for D to see. “Can you find me some?”

  There was a park not far from where the boys had yelled at them that time. There was
no sign of them now, though. From a little pond D fished four or five stones like the one her brother had shown her, stuck them in her pockets, and rushed home, the damp weights soaking through her dress and knocking against her hips.

  Her brother thanked her; she was a fine sister. They were exactly the kind of rocks he needed.

  Her lieutenant was happy that night. They did it inside the engineer’s compartment of the train exhibit. He sat on the stool and she rode him. “Wave to the people, you dirty girl! Wave to all the people watching us pass by!” Over his shoulder, at the engine, a waxwork man was forever bent, shoveling coal into the iron belly. He was stripped to the waist, navy-colored suspenders dangling around his hips. The waxwork man had a dog’s grin, wet and wide and stupid; but his shifty eyes—glass—seemed to sneak a peek. She liked that idea and followed it while her lieutenant babbled. She imagined the waxwork man continuing to shovel, not saying anything, but chuckling to himself, calmly enjoying the view, plunging the blade into the coal, lifting, pitching, plunging, lifting, pitching. The waxwork man would take his time, D though, and he would stink, and there would be nothing said, just the force between them, as they tried to break each other apart. Her lieutenant reached up and pulled the rope for the whistle, and the shriek boomed and echoed off the vaulted ceilings of the Museum. “Oh, no.” He groaned. “I think we crashed.” She patted his damp red cheek. “Sad.” Her lieutenant laid his head against her chest, not realizing that the pat had nearly been a slap—the whistle had ruined her concentration.