Awakening the Appetite

by Cheryl Snell

I was selling raffle tickets but he knew a long-shot when he saw one. Told me he was a cook and right off the bat invited me in for his homemade soup. “So you’re the literal girl next door,” he mused as he brought the steaming bowls to the table. “That’s what we should tell people.”

“Who would we tell?” I said. He was getting way ahead of himself, but the next Friday we went out to dinner. “I listen to the scuttlebutt from the kitchen,” he said, hand partly-covering his mouth. On a whim, I pulled his hand down and kissed it. He was so rattled he could barely demystify the ingredients in the dishes on our table.

The next time I saw him, he had recovered from my gesture and his shyness. We were in his kitchen making dumplings. As he shook the packet of rice-and-lentil powder into a bowl, stirring in yogurt, he said, “This shortcut will have no bearing on the taste.” We held hands and kissed a little as we waited for the mixture to ferment. When he dropped the batter into perforated cups, I watched it puff into snowballs. The sight made me think of the coconut Snowballs my ex liked to stuff in my mouth, practicing for our wedding.

I must have made a face because my host raised his eyebrows before he went back to chopping mint, onion, and cilantro for the dipping sauce. “Spices are the friend of physicians as well as the pride of cooks,” he said, as if he knew something about me I didn’t. And when I took one perfect white ball from his fingers, I remembered that deaf people imagine the sun makes noise as it rises. I bit into the round sphere, and listened.

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Cheryl Snell's books include poetry and fiction of all sizes. Her work has or will appear in Blink-Ink, Roi Faineant, Switch, and Does it Have Pockets?      

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