To Fill the Chasm that Rumbles

“I know this a lot to take in.”

Somewhere, waves crashed against a shore, pulling back to reveal the pale flesh of the beach before engulfing it again. The moon, here, is a pervert, the beach pulls her bodice up.

“She was calm going out, peaceful. It was like she was asleep.”

Their fight, all this teasing, is both loud and soothing. Concentrate just enough and maybe your mind will pull up that phantom cacophony. Maybe, you too could hear that conch’s echo, maybe the conch should stop listening in to their fights, maybe the conch should’ve been taught manners.

“Are you… okay? Are you even listening to me?”

It wouldn’t be fair to blame the conch though, his purpose was to be used then thrown away, abandoned by his matron.

“You’re obviously going through a hard time, I’ll… leave you alone for now.”

It was a while after that when Sarah sat in the silence to look at what slipped through her hands. Too many things, she realized; hands are terrible at holding what matters. 

She slumped onto the floor, surrounded on all sides by a cavalry of boxes, packaged and duck-taped shut, bloated with memories, unable to resist sighing and fraying at the vectors. Cardboard is good: for holding and keeping. She stared at the ceiling, water-stained and yellow, the walls holding it up stripped of their posters and knickknacks, pristinely bereft except for the still-ticking clock that had been there when they arrived. Feeling empty, she thought of what there was to be done about this elegiac ache.

 It took a while but she found it eventually, prying upon the flaps of a box, pulling it out. There was no dust, the book barely cold in its grave. Imagine ‘Thirty Days of Delicious Dishes’: sticky notes jutting out, cover spattered with greasy fingertips, a recipe book so well-loved it could’ve been a crime scene. The fridge was empty, though, besides a cup of expired yogurt, a bruised head of lettuce, the recently rendered unrequired packets of insulin pens, and a few oranges that rolled around. 

She recounted her grant money: there wasn’t much needed for her research, she could work with a cache of diatoms and a microscope, the seventy thousand was exorbitant. Sarah hadn’t complained then, mouth foolishly wide, agreeing to boot herself across the Atlantic, her sister following. Anyway. 

The supermarket was handsome and extortionate, doing everything it could to drain the pompous graduates settled here dry. Sarah grabbed a cart, laying the recipe book open in front of her, a checklist in the margin notes.

It was a hitlist, more like, and Sarah approached it with all the clinical precision she pictured a mercenary invoking. By the time she reached the checkout, the cart was lagging from the weight. The conveyor belt was swamped with her victims: three plump loaves of bread: white, brown and multigrain; two bags of mini croissants; three gallons of milk; one rough cantaloupe; a single bunch of bananas and bags of apples and lemons; pomegranates as red as blood; blueberry, apple and pumpkin pie fillings with three types of pie crust; several packets of mixed nuts; ten sticks of butter that were on a five-for-five sale; a couple of kilograms of basmati rice; baskets of tomatoes, cucumbers and carrots, all glistening with a produce-aisle mist; a sack of King Edward potatoes and two sewn bags of garlic and onions; one cozy griller chicken straining against the plastic foil and a few extra chicken breasts just in case; three dozen eggs wobbling in their egg tray; a generous bar of dark chocolate; every variation of peanut butter provided; black tea coupled with spearmint, a quivering branch of Madina roses, and brown rusks; the two deviant pack of chips she threw in at the end.

Sarah caught the wary look of the cashier, seeing herself in his eyes; hair mussed, eyes a drunken-beige, her mouth black at the edges: the portrait of a promising marine biologist. The transaction was a silent affair and she left with her head held high, recipe book tucked underneath her arm.

That evening she’d flipped over to Day 16, a tikka masala pictured in all its over-saturated glory. She dug out the box she’d stuffed all the spices in, propping it open on the counter; turmeric, cumin, cloves, cinnamon, black pepper, nutmeg. She cooked the rice separately, a bay leaf thrown into the pot. It was nearly eleven pm when it was finished, the curry, orange and thick, spread over the rice. She ate and ate until she was panting around her full stomach and then ate some more, downing the spoonfuls with lemonade.

(Single portions, the recipes added at the bottom, reluctantly, forlornly. These were dishes meant to be shared, why would anyone want to eat them alone. Sarah agreed.)

She went to sleep at midnight, licking the sauce off the backs of her teeth and dreaming about cabinets. 

Morning met her with a bladder tight as a drum and more excitement than she had felt in a while. Day 7: she cut through the loaf of white bread, bathing two slices in a pan of warm milk and cinnamon, chopping up bananas and shredding a piece of dark chocolate to go with it. She layered them atop the bloated toast, bitter tea steaming inside her mug. The morning news droned on in the background in the local language she’d never bothered to learn. She didn’t come here for that, she thought, kicking her feet over the textbooks strewn on top of the coffee table, plate balanced on her stomach. After, licking the sugar-sweet stickiness off her fingers, she wondered what to make next.

By the time she headed off to bed, it was two am, she’d checked off Days 19, 22, and 4. In between, she’d ate through two pomegranates, spitting the roughage out into the sink, picked out the pistachios from the mixed nuts, filled a couple of butter-soft croissants with caramelized onions and tomato slices, made it halfway through a bag of chips and left a pot of oranges, apples and lemons boiling overnight for the next day’s cider. 

Throughout the following days, Sarah cooked. Clean dishes turned scarce, she made an omelette with the same pan she used for the stir-fry, it had turned out to be slightly brown at the edges and tasted like a suspect combination of dairy and soy sauce. A breakthrough discovery that’d make gastrologists tremble. She used her hands to gulp down tap water, distantly mourning the last martyred cup. (Glass, plastic, metal: also good, versatile). She slouched on top of the table, watching the sunlight clock out for the night.

A chair in front of her, empty and mocking. The archaeological byzantine ruins of past recipes spanned between them, licked off every plate, reduced to grime and the wandering tittynope thieved by the ant nomads that had begun to brigade. She imagined what she’d say to her, maybe something about Sarah not being totally shithouse in the kitchen after all.

Her phone had buzzed and buzzed until the battery gave out, the clothes she hadn’t bothered to change since the first morning started to give off a distinct odour, a smattering of consequential pimples and blackheads sprouted across her balmy face. She wiped the sweat off her cheeks and stuck her head back into the oven to check on the swollen pie.

She ate it directly from the pan, the fork from the previous day’s kabsa stabbed through the flesh, sour viscera flooded out in thick waves, she opened her mouth. 

The clock ticked, the ants would swarm over and colonize the leftovers if left uncovered, a toothache started up once again, the itchiness of her scalp had gotten almost unbearable, there were things to be done about that. She hit the pillow snoring.

The next day, she was drinking her second cup of tea of the morning, dunking two rusks in at a time with the digestives she found squirrelled away in the cupboard (her sister always hid them, afraid Sarah would eat them all in one go) when there was a knock on the door. 

Sarah wiped her mouth with her indiscernibly stained sleeve, before trudging to the peephole. A man was bouncing from one foot to the other in front of her door. Callum, was it? He’d bothered them a lot when they first arrived, asking Sarah out to dinner over and over again. She’d laughed then, entwining her arm with her sister’s, snapping her gum around a sharp grin. They were heading to the beach, Sarah with her mesh nets and containers, her sister with a good book to sit back and flirt with. Sarah had remarked loudly about how nice it would be to have free time, Callum had chuckled and rubbed his neck, offered them grape soda for the way: ice-cold and bittersweet.

That didn’t explain what he was doing here now, though, shoes scuffing her welcome mat.

Sarah cleared her throat, a rearrangement of apparatuses.“What do you want?” 

There was a silence, probably he was as taken aback by the hoarse garble as Sarah was. Weeks since she’d spoken? A month? A neglected body so often rusted over and coughed, the human condition could be reduced to a door hinge.

“I, uh-” he floundered like an idiot, “listen, Sarah… I’ve been worried, alright? I know I seem like a proper bastard since you probably think I’m going to, I don’t know, come onto you- or something. But, honestly, I wouldn’t take advantage of a person like that, so no ulterior motives here- I’m rambling, sorry. This isn’t about me, it’s about you. But I haven’t seen you in weeks, I just wanted- needed to know you were still okay after… what happened. It’s been driving me halfway mad-”

Sarah opened the door then, startling Callum who’d pressed his forehead to the wood. He backed up, words caught in his mouth at the sight of her. His eyes flashed; Sarah wanted disgust, wanted him to recoil, wanted him to leave so she could go back to her tea and the incomprehensible local news anchor with the red lipstick and the laugh lines who always chattered away about wind speeds, alone, every morning.

Instead, his face broke down, features tumbling after each other like a house of cards, “Oh, Sarah.” His voice was thick with despair, hazel eyes wide, brows drawn. He reached out to her and Sarah stepped away, mouth wobbling before she slammed the door in his face, not wanting to see him looking at her like she’d broken his heart.

She staggered into the living room, hitting the floor with a thud and curling onto herself, knees mussing her hair, ribs touching pelvis. It hurt, but she didn’t stop constricting, burying herself into the objects strewn around the parquet from the boxes she’d defiled. Her tears dampened the fabric of her pants, and she spiralled into a broken conch, echo fleeing through the cracks, leaving only silence. Echos were a reflection, and there was nothing more in this empty hush to reflect against. She squeezed her eyes shut, humming jaggedly over her sobs in the world’s most pathetic one-man elephant symphony. Head throbbing, she considered all that had happened and all that was left.

It felt like hours until she resurfaced, but the drumming tick-tock of the clock could’ve easily been contracted into minutes. Sarah breathed brokenly out into the knee she’d been biting into, and sat up, disturbing the marching band of ants by her foot. She wondered how she looked now, crazy hair/crazy eyes, sitting in a deserted house, population: zero + negative one, empty space beside a gaping lack. Her sister would’ve told her to stop playing with her words. She’d be right, maybe. “Funerals are for the living,” Sarah would’ve said instead, “melodrama is your death debt to me.” 

She would’ve been hit on the head for that, told to stop bitching around.

Her tea was getting cold, Callum’s shadow was still flitting underneath the doorway, and the scent of burnt pancakes was rising into the air. There were things to be done about that and that and that. Sarah wiped off her snot with the last remaining clean patch of clothing and stood, stepping over a husk of a recipe book on her way to the shower.