Hungry Hearts

by Elsie Chapman

  Lola Simeona caught you experimenting with adobo casserole the day after; her anger was immediate. American food—bland food, she sneered—wasn’t potent enough, and your fusion concept watered any spells down. “Why would you add adobo to Kano cuisine?” she snapped at you. “They have no taste buds that they had not stolen from those darker than them first! You dilute our magic, hija!”

  She showed you how to make her special adobo recipe—proper adobo, with soy sauce and vinegar and spices—and it tasted exquisite, better than any other grandmother would have made. She offered both meals for free to the carinderia’s clientele that day, much to their delight. Sampling your casserole brought them no perceptible changes; eating Lola’s adobo left them fresh, eager, and thrumming with energy, exhaustion falling away like a discarded cloak.

  She let you watch the customers eat, long enough to get her point across, before taking pity on you and announcing that she was adding something new to the menu, and that you had made it.

  * * *

  The dinuguan was your own recipe, made with no help from your grandmother, and it was the first official viand at the carinderia that was truly yours. It was pork belly cubes and sautéed garlic and onions and banana peppers in a rich savory blood stew. Dinuguan was an alarming dish even by bizarre standards, but the regulars who came to your lola’s stall were always ready to try new things, and many wound up asking for seconds with their rice.

  You’d introduced a spell for better concentration into the savory stew. With exams coming up, it was a welcome addition to many. Lola Simeona assured you it was one of the best she’d ever had.

  There’s a quiet sort of pride there, creating things with your hands that people take pleasure in.

  She made you bring the rest of the adobo to school the next day—to keep your spirits up, she said—along with some of the leftover dinuguan. You tried to hide the latter, pretending to buy the cafeteria lunch, but Steven saw right through your ruse. He snatched it away, opened the Tupperware, and gagged at the sight of the thick, bloody stew within. “You’re literally a bloodsucker, you disgusting monkey,” he said, and lobbed the whole container at your face.

  “She slipped,” he said, and no one bothered to say differently.

  It took hours to get the stains out of your dress.

  * * *

  Never make it personal, Lola had said.

  You couldn’t make it personal, but you were still dripping in blood by the time you arrived home and up for planning a revenge that was a long time coming. You knew exactly what to do—you’d put the spell in an ube roll, because the last time you brought that to school, he had eaten it instead of throwing it away. People like him were more susceptible to magic, you remembered. It will break them in the long run, Lola had said.

  You waited until after dinner, after Lola Simeona had returned to the carinderia. You entered the kitchen and turned on the lights before opening the window, so that the fresh telltale smell of baking bread would drift out and be lost amid the blaring horns of the noisy street below. But in the moments before the sounds of traffic wafted in, she spoke up.

  “You are walking on dangerous ground.” Lola was dressed in her flannel gown, long white hair pinned to her head with half a dozen rollers. You didn’t know if she’d anticipated your move and asked Lola Teodora to cover for her at the stall, or if this was an unfortunate coincidence (though coincidences never seemed to apply when it came to your grandmother). Neither explanation detracted from her quiet fury, at the bunched way her shoulders rolled forward. “How dare you disobey me.”

  You didn’t mean to. You only wanted—

  “What you want is your own selfishness!” She stepped forward—she would never hit you, but when she jerked her arm back as if she might, you flinched all the same. “Do you seriously think that there are no responsibilities that come with our kulam? Why do you think I select my customers carefully, though I can make more money cooking for everyone without prejudice?”

  This was different. You were maybe only going to give Steven de Guzman acne to last until his sixties. Or an untreatable hernia, maybe take away his sense of taste. He was hurting you. Just like the Japanese soldiers had—

  Lola Simeona’s face twisted, wrinkled skin and hooded eyes suddenly grotesque under the fluorescent light. “How dare you think it is the same thing.” Her voice was quiet, as dead as the hour. “Did the boys do to you what those Hapones did to my village? To the children living there? To my family? You get bullied in school, and you think it is exactly the same?”

  She yanked the refrigerator door open and snatched up a plate of sisig special that Lola Florabel had prepared beforehand, and you realized she had anticipated this. A granddaughter was easier to read than customers. “Do you think you are worthy enough to seek your revenge? Then come here, Ami. Show me. Eat.”

  The sisig was cold, but it built bonfires in your mouth all the same. Barely halfway through and already you were struggling, throat burning for a gasp of water, begging for a second of relief. Two more bites and you surrendered, gulping down the milk Lola had set down on the table, the rest of the meal unfinished.

  Lola watched you drain the glass, her dark eyes a mystery. “Clean this up,” she said brusquely, gesturing at the mess on the table, and left without another word.

  * * *

  When you came home from school the next day, Lola Simeona was not in the carinderia—only the second time she’d ever missed work, the first being just the night before. “She’s gone to your school,” Lola Teodora informed you. “She never said why, or when she’d be back.”

  Despite their busy schedules, it was always your parents who went to your school’s PTA meetings, the ones who’d always dealt with teachers and principals and administrators. Your grandmother had never set foot there before, and for good reason. You were certain she would wind up traumatizing some of the students, and wondered how your parents would react if it was bad enough for the principal to call, probably begging for help.

  By the time you arrived back at school, Lola was already leaving the principal’s office. You could tell she was unhappy, with her lips pursed and her left eye twitching. The principal stood behind her, still murmuring apologetic platitudes until she cut him off with a curt “There is nothing more you can say to me that will change my opinion of you, or of this place.”

  You didn’t know what had happened, but from their reactions it was clear your lola had gained the upper hand somehow. You wanted to apologize. You wanted to thank her. You wanted to know if you’d been expelled. You already knew nobody else was being punished, but at the moment it didn’t matter. She’d come to help you, and that was more than anyone else had done.

  She showed no surprise upon seeing you, only raised her head haughtily. “Come on, Ami. We are going home.”

  Lola closed up shop at six p.m. that day—again, another first. Six p.m. was one of your busiest hours.

  Now the three women sat at the table like they once had two years ago, but it was not for you to season their soup with your blood. “I had a talk with your principal,” Lola Simeona began, nose all scrunched up, and you were almost tempted to ask if she’d scared him enough to ban her from school. “He asked me to schedule a meeting, to talk to him at another time, but I said that this will not wait. But in the end, it was a waste of my time. None of the teachers have helped you. None of your classmates have helped you. And your principal says he can do very little.”

  Some of your classmates tried, but there was only so much they could do before they became targets themselves. Your grandmother dismissed the defense with a wave of her hand. “They were not successful. That was all that matters.”

  She fell silent, thinking. The carinderia was quiet, an open grave despite the busy sounds of other nearby shops, as if an invisible barrier lay between you and them and could not be breached. “And do you still wish to create your”—her mouth turned up in a sneer without her realizing it—“your casseroles? Your ube ensaymada
s?”

  Yes. You still wanted to make them.

  “And do you still want to seek revenge on the boy because you think it is the same as—”

  No! No, there was no equivalence there. Not at all. Nothing could compare to what the Japanese had done. But you had the right to not be bullied all the same, to be treated like everyone else. You had the right to defend yourself and the right to feel safe in your own school, and just because it was not as bad as other things didn’t mean you had to endure and suffer for it.

  You could not be an asaprán witch if all you could show for your troubles was being constantly bullied for the food you worked hard to make. It wasn’t fair to have dinuguan, kare-kare, Soup No. 5, or papaitan thrown in your face at least once every two weeks. It wasn’t fair that people only approached you when you had free food to give—free food they didn’t deem too weird to eat, anyway—but turned their backs when you didn’t.

  You could not be a mangkukulam if you commanded no respect, if you could not make them see why you should be respected. You could not be a good cook if you relied always on your lola’s instructions but were not allowed to experiment on your own. It could not be your meals and it could not be your magic if all you did was follow a list you had no creative control over. It could not be your own magic if it could not be your own recipes. Fusion and all, even if they turned out to be watered down.

  Lola Simeona, Lola Florabel, and Lola Teodora watched you silently after you had finished your diatribe. And then their mouths lifted in unison, and on the speckled seabed of their faces their smiles shone like pearls.

  “I lied,” Lola Simeona said, then corrected herself. “No, I only kept part of the truth from you. The rule is that we cannot make this personal, that we cannot bear our own grudges. We cannot abuse the magic. We cannot be cruel.

  “But we cannot always mask our spite with sugar. We cannot allow transgressions against us to pass. We are allowed to defend ourselves. I wanted to see how far you would go outside the boundaries we set up, if you would come to the same conclusions yourself. I killed the Hapones, after all, because they had made it personal.”

  (You should have known all along. The story about your lola and the Japanese—she had broken the same rules she had imposed on you, was waiting all this time for you to piece it together.)

  “I asked you once if people would trust a judge who takes matters into their own hands,” Lola said, and you realized she was expecting an answer. “If you would trust the chef who sees potential criminals in every soul.”

  You remembered your customers’ tendencies to ignore your lola’s strange quirks, the way they turned away when she had chased the Japanese man out long before they knew who he had been to her. You remembered classmates who had looked away from your bullying, but were eager all the same to accept the ensaymada you handed out.

  Yes, you decided. Because people were selfish, even if they didn’t mean to be. As long as they could have their ube rolls and ensaymada, they’d look away. It was not fair—but neither should you be.

  Because sometimes real justice can’t wait for karma.

  Because, like your lola’s with the Japanese, your conscience is clear.

  Lola Simeona leaned back, her pride apparent for all to see. Even when they deserved it? you remembered asking, all those months ago. Lola never did answer that question. “Now you understand human nature,” she said. “Now you understand why civility is not always the best option.”

  * * *

  You were going to make mistakes, you knew. Your ideas, your recipes, were an untried concept at the carinderia—not because the magic was weaker, but because they’d never been done this way before, and no one but you knew where exactly to begin. Tradition wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t a leash; it was a guideline for other things that could be just as delicious.

  Lola Simeona had made her thoughts very clear on the matter—turn your recipes into spells that were as good as hers or even better, and she would gladly support your creations at the carinderia. It was only a matter of time—you were certain. Already she had taken a shine to your chili pork adobo, though she wasn’t ready to admit it yet.

  The next morning, you brought your freshly baked ube rolls to school. And when Steven de Guzman took his first bite, you couldn’t help but smile.

  Moments to Return

  BY ADI ALSAID

  The hostess led me toward a two-person table in the middle of the dim-sum restaurant I had hoped would cure me of my fear of death.

  I looked at the tables I passed, each dish at the restaurant a love letter to garlic and chili and oil. A shrine to steam and starch and meat. By the time I took a seat, my mouth was watering, even though I still didn’t know what the hell dim sum technically was. I knew it had something to do with serving tea, and that it was a centuries-old tradition, which in my desperate mind made its supposed magical properties somewhat more plausible. I avoided research that might tell me otherwise so that I could hang on to my belief.

  I couldn’t go on the way I had been, couldn’t face my brothers again until I’d changed.

  The menu at the restaurant was an electronic tablet, about ten pages to flip through. Most items were phonetically translated from Chinese or just listed one or two ingredients with no further explanation as to how the dish was presented. There were a handful of pictures, but I couldn’t tell which picture went along with which dish. I looked around at the other tables, noticed the way the light was coming in through the large pane of glass at the front of the restaurant and joining the too-bright bulbs overhead. Not a shadow to the place, all these human faces lit up to their fullest detail. Wrinkles and the lack of them, scars, dominant genetic traits and recessive ones, lives leading up to this moment and unfurling afterward, each toward the same final destination.

  * * *

  I had been in the US for all of two hours and had already felt myself on the verge of oblivion twice. My hostel room was cramped, but elegant in that we’re-a-hostel-trying-to-be-cool-but-without-spending-any-money way. I took a seat on the bed and ran a hand over the white linen, smoothing out the wrinkles caused by my weight. All five fingers felt the coolness of the strange sheet, a miracle of a sensation. My brain reminded me that it was a gift I’d eventually have to return. Oblivion number one. I stayed put for nearly an hour, unable to pull myself out of the whirlpool of my thoughts.

  When hunger finally untethered me, I begrudgingly plugged in the hostel’s Wi-Fi password so I could look up how to get to Hungry Heart Row. It had been nice to not have the use of cell service since landing, to look around at this new country I’d read so much about, consumed so much of, had never had much interest in seeing personally. One by one, my apps sent me complaints that I’d been away. My group chat with friends had 243 messages. There were three from my mom, prying in that passive-aggressive way that was trying not to pry. I decided to call her after I got some food in me.

  I reached into my backpack and found the little notebook I used to write things down in at work back in Kotor. When I’d first started giving tours of Old Town, I thought I would fill tons of the pocket-size pads, one a day maybe. I’d envisioned stockades of them overflowing from my little room, spilling out from drawers, full of the wisdom of strangers from across the world. But that same eighty-page notebook had been with me for all three summers since I started working for the cruise companies.

  The tourists were boring, sure. They spoke too quickly in languages I only had a slippery grasp of, and half of what they said were the same complaints, the same observations of Old Town’s cuteness. “Oh, the mountains, the water.” I could say that in a dozen languages at this point. But I’d never filled the notebook for a strange and simple reason: The corner of each page had a little illustration of a tiny dancing skeleton. I hadn’t given it much thought when I bought it, and I have no idea why it was even there, I must have bought it sometime around Halloween. It kept me from reaching for the notebook as much as I could have, so tourist observations had
gone mostly unrecorded, except for the rare occasion when I felt stronger than the grave.

  The main example, of course, were the words that would fix me, or at least unlock a way in which I could be okay with it all, stop thinking those same thoughts and enjoy my fortunate life: Qing Xian Yuan.

  The Internet told me that the restaurant was a short enough walk from the hostel, just across the river. After that first fall into oblivion, I pictured myself succumbing again, this time in public. The river’s murky depths could do it, or a walk past a funeral home, an advertisement in a pharmacy window; the world was full of its reminders, innocuous to so many but not to me. I downloaded a few podcasts and a fresh music playlist, so as not to give my thoughts too much freedom to take over. But I kept the desire to disappear into my headphones at bay, curious about the voices out in the hall and the reception area of the hostel. I closed the door behind me, and as the voices got more and more distinct, I felt around for a familiar accent. I like talking to people. I like foreignness. That is why I loved my job, despite the boring tourists. Small talk is mostly banal, but the potential to break through the small talk is exciting, and redemptive. I don’t really know what I live for, but if I can point at anything it is this. A conversation with a stranger that can turn into a friendship. If not that, then just a memorable conversation. If we all die and our lives are forgotten, it is these conversations that make an impression on the deletable history of the world.

  When I identified the soft lilt of a French tongue in the hostel’s lobby, the clipped vowels of a German accent, I started thinking about languages. How long they went on for. How long my timeline was compared to theirs. I felt that familiar panic building in my chest and rushed past the two girls sitting at a table and the group of three checking in, their hiking backpacks leaning at their feet. I slipped on my headphones, hit play on the first thing that could keep my mind from churning, pushed open the door to the outside world. Oblivion number two.