Collapsible by Tim Conley

Author:Tim Conley [Conley, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Star Books
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Day Before She

She set the photo album on the side table, not thinking about how it somehow never managed to return to the shelf these days (why was that?), and crossed to the ringing phone. An unfamiliar voice, older and with crisp, almost forced articulation, asked for her by name. She said, “Yes, this is she.”

“Look here,” the voice said, “I have a few things to say about your cookbook, the most recent one. How you can bear to have your name on such a book, I’ll never understand. It’s terrible, honestly terrible. I must have tried a dozen recipes, all of them disasters, before I gave up.”

She did not even consider interrupting (why was that?).

“Incorrect portions, sloppy composition, both in the dishes and the writing, come to that. Your previous cookbooks, they were bad, but this one is dreadful, terrible. Honestly. Nothing I tried making from it worked out. The pictures bear no resemblance. And you have no idea,” and the voice quavered, rising higher than perhaps it had planned, with no way of going back, “no idea what it feels like to feel cheated after so much work, even as I allowed for the level of incompetence and disappointment I’ve come to expect in dealing with these books of yours, these exceptionally bad books. Even some of the ingredients are irresponsibly chosen, fashionable and expensive and rare bagatelles and bits of nothing put in to seem au courant.” The voice sounded as though it came from a throat held in a tight, perhaps squeezing grip, which acted as a monitoring influence, holding back certain words, checking emotion as best it might.

There was a pause in which neither spoke.

“Well,” she offered.

“Disaster after disaster. It is one thing to be dull and bad, as you well know your other books are, but this one, this one is unforgivable.”

There was a clicking sound and for a moment she had thought the caller had hung up, but then the voice said, “That’s all I have to say,” and, after another moment, “Goodbye,” and a more definitive click followed.

She set the phone down and lit the burner under the kettle. The different teas were arranged in a special order. Not alphabetical order or by region: a personal logic was at work, but it was a logic of some time ago, strange to her now.

“The drinking of tea is an escape from time’s passing.”

If there had been a pet in the house, a cat, for instance, it would have looked up and so alerted her to the fact the she had spoken this aloud (why was that?). The alerted look of such a cat or other animal might have acted as a friendly but firm statement of contradiction: no, it isn’t, it is a cup of tea, and there is no such escape.

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