Sweetness #9 by Stephan Eirik Clark

Author:Stephan Eirik Clark
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fluffer Nutter, dpgroup.org
ISBN: 9780316370103
Publisher: Hachette Book Group USA
Published: 2014-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

At my workbench, I grabbed a screwdriver from the pegboard organizer and stabbed at my bag of chips. Tsssssh! Such a wonderful sound, that rushing release of air, but fleeting, too, the pleasure all too fleeting.

I sat on my stool and stuffed my mouth, chewing, muttering, unable to leave this behind me. When I’d calmed down some, I reached for a small metal figurine and pulled a mounted magnifying glass round toward me. I had my paints, brushes, and a little dish of water nearby, right where I’d left them the night before. Modeling. I’d first lost myself in the hobby when I was living in England and my father would return from the office in London with one of the kits then popular with young boys: RAF bombers and German Panzer divisions, Aston Martins and Rovers and the Queen Mary. I must have pieced together and painted nearly every plastic part they sold, but none with the same all-consuming passion that I’d give a diorama the summer that my father moved us to New Jersey. Then, at the onset of puberty, in a new country without the comfort or companionship of a friend or foe, I escaped my longing to be back in my mother’s England by re-creating the Normandy Invasion on my bedroom floor. I focused on Utah Beach, though with a slightly ahistorical eye. Along with the barges spilling their troops and the planes hanging from overhead wires, I placed one more group of Allied soldiers beneath the threat of the Germans in their pillboxes above: the 3032nd Mobile Baking Division, with whom my father landed on this beach on D-Day+24. The Fighting Quartermasters hunkered down behind their mobile kitchen, eager to move on toward Berlin and start pumping out sixty thousand pounds of battlefield bread each day.

Following that diorama, I built still more: “Winter at Valley Forge,” “The Retreat (1812),” and “Victory at Yankee Stadium,” commemorating the Baltimore Colts’ stunning world championship of 1958. But in college I gave it all up after my roommate looked at me strangely when I told him I was thinking of doing the Lincoln-Douglas debates. I had only returned to the hobby this summer, but already I had completed a small Cro-Magnon scene (“The Discovery of Fire”) and another that paid tribute to one of Genghis Khan’s brave warriors, that unknown man who, after riding for hours across the lonely steppe, had overturned his shield on the coals of his company’s fire and created, first to the amusement and then the delight of his fellows, the world’s first Mongolian barbecue.

This evening I was working on the scene of Nicolas Appert’s moment of triumph, when he stood in his food-splattered kitchen in the French countryside, sinking a glass bottle of partridge, vegetables, and gravy into a tub of scalding-hot water. He lived during the Age of Revolutions, when military conflicts were so frequent and so large that you could no longer hope to feed your troops with food culled from the surrounding villages.

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