At The Core

The house smelled faintly of apples and cinnamon when we stepped inside. Zac shed his coat and reached out his arm to take mine. After hanging them up, he led me into the kitchen. I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until I took in the sight in front of me and felt the tension flow from my body.

Zac’s mother sat at the kitchen table, her eyebrows furrowed in concentration as her tiny hands peeled an apple. Quickly but carefully, she rid the round fruit of its tough exterior, the skin landing on the table in broad curls that looked like ribbons. As she worked, thin blue veins tapped the surface of her own skin, making it glow.

“Hey, Mom,” Zac’s voice was gentle and it prodded her gaze towards us. She was so focused on her task that she hadn’t noticed our presence. She took us in with wide blue eyes, seemed to truly recognize us. It was a good day.

“Oh, you’re home early!” The peeler shook slightly in her hand as she spoke, the small instrument looking as though it could crush her fragile bones. “I’m making apple pie. It was supposed to be a surprise.”

Her eyes shone brightly. My throat tightened at the simple sincerity of her words.

“Well, you know how I am with surprises. I’ve never been patient enough for them,” Zac said, flopping into the empty chair in front of him. He plucked a strip of skin from the table and stretched it tautly between his fingers, his fingertips grazing its crispness.

“How can I help?” I asked, sliding into the chair opposite her.

“You can peel some of these, if you’d like,” she motioned to the four remaining apples balanced on the tabletop and set the peeler beside them. “My hands are starting to get sore.”

Zac chuckled as I picked up the peeler and turned it around in my hands, examining it. He sensed my discomfort. At his laughter, his mom looked at him inquisitively, like a child.

“Janie’s not a very good cook,” Zac explained.

Blood rushed swiftly to my face, and I imagined that it filled my cheeks with nearly the same color as the deep red skin of the apples. Although his comment was spoken with a good-natured smile, I couldn’t help feeling the sting of his words, along with their truth.

But now was not the time nor the place for an argument over something so trivial. I matched his grin as I gripped the peeler in one hand and grabbed a medium-sized apple from the table with the other.

“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,” his mother said placidly. “Everyone can cook. The only people who fail don’t care enough to even try. But Janie cares, and I know she'll try.”

As I started peeling, I noticed every motion that my body made. I felt nervous, put to the test; and I always became much more aware of my own mortality whenever I was around her. I felt the way my arm tensed up and my lips pursed, along with the quiet, shallow breaths that escaped them in a slightly offbeat rhythm. I watched my dark veins spread prominently across their territory like webbed feet beneath my skin as I worked. Choppy, uneven layers fell away from the apple and gathered on the table like a heap of dying soldiers.

I felt a barely-perceptible pressure on my wrist, light and feathery, and realized that his mom had taken my hand in hers and was guiding the peeler towards the apple at a less harsh angle. With her gentle direction, a layer of skin cascaded from the apple in an almost perfect spiral. Her fingers lifted from my wrist with the same weightlessness with which they had descended. Another neat curl of skin was added to the table’s colorful display. I smiled, pleased with my small but significant accomplishment.

“There,” I pronounced happily, setting the naked, coreless apple in the table’s center. “Maybe I’m not that bad after all!”

I shot a pointed look in Zac’s direction, and was taken aback to find his hazel eyes wet with unshed tears. He scooted his chair close to me, leaned over, pressed his lips against mine. His mom’s entire face was beaming; even her wrinkles seemed to smile. Maybe, by overcoming that simple challenge, I had received full admittance into a family so close to me but not quite my own.

(word count: 745)

Bread-and-butterflies.

I hit the ground running. Leaping clear across the room with its sun-streaked floorboards, I felt the weight of my body outweigh my sense of balance as I skidded into the wall with a thud. Dust bloomed off the ledge of the naked window frame. My uncontrollable giggles echoed through the empty apartment. Empty, save for a mattress and box spring stacked in the middle of the room.

“Stop it!” I shrieked as Adam, his amber eyes translucent with the sunlight streaming through the window, lurched towards me. He stepped off the bed with ease, arms raised like a bear.

“You started it,” He grumbled in a low voice, stumbling forward as I darted out from under his grasp.

“You started it!” I screamed from across the room. I snatched a pile of sheets off the bed and threw them at him as he turned around and lumbered towards me again. This only exacerbated his presence, as he turned into a towering wall of cloth and man. It wasn’t before long that he held me pinned against the wall.

“Fine, you have me,” I sighed, pulling my hair out of my sweaty face. “What are you going to do with me now?”

“I’m going to EAT YOU!” He snarled, collecting my body in his large arms.

I wiggled and kicked, giggling and gasping for air as I slowly weasled my way out of his grip. “How about I make you food instead?”

He instantly released me and tossed the sheets off from over his head. “Okay.”

Adam followed me into the small kitchenette, and I opened the miniature fridge underneath the counter. A half-eaten chunk of cheese, a small chunk of butter wrapped in wax paper and a half empty plastic bottle of milk sat inside, unblinking. With a new loaf of bread from the neighbors’ next door as a welcome gift, I decided to pull out the pad of butter. “How does toast sound to you?”

As I fumbled through the still un-packed boxes sitting on the kitchen counter, Adam pulled himself onto the narrow kitchen counter. “Sounds delicious.”

“Ahh, yes!” I finally retrieved the toaster from the clutches of the bottom of the third cardboard box. Brushing off the dusty top and then upturning it to shake out crumbs into the sink, I finally set it on the counter and plugged it in.

Meanwhile, Adam snatched a butter knife off the top of another box and started to unwrap the butter. I turned to watch him find the butter still unpleasantly warm from our earlier drive, the one with the last of our things. Clarified butter with clusters of white fat dribbled down the sides of the wax paper. I remarked disdainfully as I unwrapped the loaf of bread, but Adam grinned and licked the sides of his fingers where the butter had bled. “Mmm delicious.” He laughed.

“Perhaps we could just live off butter and bread. Butter will fatten us up, keep us warm in the winter, save the heating bill…” He rambled off more reasons as he got off the counter and I pulled two slices of bread out plunked them into the toaster.

“Keep our skin soft,” Adam stepped up behind me and gently touches my bare arm with his buttery fingers, rubbing the fat into my deeply tanned skin. He leaned down and kissed my arm. I closed my eyes as he murmured on my shoulder. “Yep, butter will keep us together.”

“You better save some for the toast.” I croaked, feeling the wry words crawl up my throat. The toast popped up.

Adam stepped back and leaned with his back against the counter as I gingerly plucked the toast out by the points and laid it down on paper towels. He licked the rest of his finger tips quickly, and handed me the butter knife and pad. “Nah, butter’s just the frosting. It’ll just make us fat. The bread is what will keep us alive.”

(662 words)

Day 4: Cooking.

48: Cooking. Use cookery - menu preparation, the love of this essential process - as a way of understanding a man and a woman's relationship to each other. Or, to put it another way, use an evening of cooking (and perhaps entertaining) as a way of exploring a relationship between a man and a woman. If you have any kind of experience with cooking and know of certain unusual recipes, adapt these for the purposes of this exercise. 600 words.