A Recipe for Disaster & Other Unlikely Tales of Love by Eufemia Fantetti

Author:Eufemia Fantetti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mother Tongue Publishing

When he gets home, he notices the gaps on the bookshelf. “Where are my journals?” He steps around the boxes and suitcases in the hallway as if they had always been there.

“I need them.” She tilts her head toward the bag in the corner of the living room.

“They don’t belong to you.”

She tosses some scarves into a box and seals it. “Today’s the day, I’m moving to California. It never gets cold there, in Southern California.”

“We can’t go. I have my job. I have responsibilities.”

“There’s nothing to keep me here.”

“There’s me,” he says.

She looks away, stares out the sliding glass door to the balcony. The late afternoon sun streams through the track blinds, patterning pseudo prison stripes on the wall.

“Who gets the bed then?” he asks. “Who gets the microwave? The steamer? The salt and pepper shakers?”

She thinks it’s funny that he would bring up kitchen items more than anything else, but she doesn’t laugh. She won’t need a microwave in California. “You keep them,” she says. “Help me finish.”

She points him in the direction of the bathroom, while she cleans out the hall closet and imagines him throwing out her makeup, stuffing her toiletry bag with trash and freshly used Q-tips. She assumes he wants to punish her for newfound autonomy.

“All finished?” she asks.

“Done like dinner.” He zips the bag and tosses it to her.

They turn to the bookshelf together. He picks up Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus.

“That’s mine. I remember buying it.”

“You gave it to me. For Valentine’s Day. It says right here, ‘From Carol with love’—look.”

She looks inside the cover and sees her messy scrawl. “I want it.”

“No,” he says. “I’ll need it to keep me warm.”

“Liar. You’ll read it to the women you’ll bring back here into our bed. They’ll see how cold it is here, how cold your feet are. Cold feet, cold heart. It will drive them crazy when they find out your feet are always like blocks of ice, even if they’re rubbing and sucking and exhaling on your toes.”

“I didn’t drive you crazy,” he says. “You were crazy when I met you. Remember what you said last night? You used to tell me I was lucky number three, third time’s a charm. Now all you can say is I came in third. A third-place finish. When did I stop being so lucky?”

“No. I don’t remember.”

“The way to a man’s heart—” he begins.

“— is straight through his ribcage,” she says. It’s an old joke that used to make them laugh.

“You’re a terrible cook.”

“I can live with that. Fine. I can’t live with you.”

“Someday you’ll turn fluorescent orange from all that Kraft Dinner,” he says. “I’ll know where you are from the nuclear glow.”

The thought appears to comfort him, as if one day he might see a large glimmering orb at the end of the street and know to exit the building through the back door. “At least I’ll be warm,” she says.

“You can have my lunch. I didn’t eat it.”

“You haven’t lost any weight.

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