Don’t Tell Me
Hybrid by Amy Marques
"I was thinking about the unsaid and unsayable in the lives of so many – particularly women – and of how much has changed in the last decades and centuries and of how much remains the same."
Amy Marques calls books friends and is on a first name basis with fictional characters. She’s been nominated for awards and has visual art, poetry, and prose in many journals, including Raw Lit. She’s editor and artist for Duets and has a poetry book coming in 2024.
X: @amybookwhisper1
IG: @amyiscold
https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com
X: @amybookwhisper1
IG: @amyiscold
https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com
Disenchantment in Three Dishes
Fiction by Emily Macdonald
first published in Retreat West - June 2022
When Romy believed in a life of mung beans and home-cultured yoghurt, she cooked The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Reading the recipe, she imagined the potent broccoli spears standing in virulent green, their curled and congested heads bright and vivid on their tender stems. But the brown rice forest floor—blended with eggs, mint, garlic, dill, and cheese—turned to sludge, and the broccoli canopy slid sideways and discoloured as if the dish was hit by a mudslide and felling at the same time. She wondered if the cheese was to blame. The recipe said Swiss. She’d used an economy block of cheddar after cutting away some mould. Romy placed the dish on the table. There wasn’t anything else to eat.
The sardines were supposed to poke their tails out of the breadcrumb crust at cheerful angles as if they’d been washed up by the tide and were burying their heads in the sand. But the blend of iron and brine, bony fish and sodden bread was inedible. The tomato sauce underneath looked bloody and murderous. The friends—the kind who Instagram their plates—were loudly relieved when Romy declared the dish a disaster. They made jokes, rifting on the names of popular seafood restaurants—Unsexy Fish, J Shreekey’s and Sick Brine for Rick Stein.
Romy topped up the wine glasses, then returned to the kitchen and improvised a fresh herb and pea risotto. When she scraped the sardines into the bin, she wondered if it was time to find newer, kinder friends.
As a child, Romy made a birthday cake for her mother. She used self-raising flour and added extra baking powder with coffee grains for flavouring. The cake rose, triumphant, domed, and proud like a hooded mushroom springing from the earth.
Mother tapped the crust before she sank the wishing knife in and smiled at the knock and echo. The cake was hollow, a pretender covering only hot air.
Romy no longer makes culinary mistakes. Foodie types covet an invitation to eat at her table. When the guests—flushed and grateful—list their way home, she licks over her winnings: the cheap wine she decanted into handsome carafes, the gluten-rich flour she used to thicken a sauce, the chicken stock secreted into a vegetarian dish.
In addled sleep, Romy fights through broccoli brush. She struggles, sinking into soup warm swamplands where fish scream at her from gaping red mouths.
She tells herself to stay calm, remain in one place. She shelters, taking refuge under a cap of pale fungus quills, but when she chooses a direction to walk in, it’s breadcrumbs she leaves on the trail.
(The Enchanted Broccoli Forest is a recipe by Mollie Katzen, published in a book by the same name.)
When Romy believed in a life of mung beans and home-cultured yoghurt, she cooked The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Reading the recipe, she imagined the potent broccoli spears standing in virulent green, their curled and congested heads bright and vivid on their tender stems. But the brown rice forest floor—blended with eggs, mint, garlic, dill, and cheese—turned to sludge, and the broccoli canopy slid sideways and discoloured as if the dish was hit by a mudslide and felling at the same time. She wondered if the cheese was to blame. The recipe said Swiss. She’d used an economy block of cheddar after cutting away some mould. Romy placed the dish on the table. There wasn’t anything else to eat.
The sardines were supposed to poke their tails out of the breadcrumb crust at cheerful angles as if they’d been washed up by the tide and were burying their heads in the sand. But the blend of iron and brine, bony fish and sodden bread was inedible. The tomato sauce underneath looked bloody and murderous. The friends—the kind who Instagram their plates—were loudly relieved when Romy declared the dish a disaster. They made jokes, rifting on the names of popular seafood restaurants—Unsexy Fish, J Shreekey’s and Sick Brine for Rick Stein.
Romy topped up the wine glasses, then returned to the kitchen and improvised a fresh herb and pea risotto. When she scraped the sardines into the bin, she wondered if it was time to find newer, kinder friends.
As a child, Romy made a birthday cake for her mother. She used self-raising flour and added extra baking powder with coffee grains for flavouring. The cake rose, triumphant, domed, and proud like a hooded mushroom springing from the earth.
Mother tapped the crust before she sank the wishing knife in and smiled at the knock and echo. The cake was hollow, a pretender covering only hot air.
Romy no longer makes culinary mistakes. Foodie types covet an invitation to eat at her table. When the guests—flushed and grateful—list their way home, she licks over her winnings: the cheap wine she decanted into handsome carafes, the gluten-rich flour she used to thicken a sauce, the chicken stock secreted into a vegetarian dish.
In addled sleep, Romy fights through broccoli brush. She struggles, sinking into soup warm swamplands where fish scream at her from gaping red mouths.
She tells herself to stay calm, remain in one place. She shelters, taking refuge under a cap of pale fungus quills, but when she chooses a direction to walk in, it’s breadcrumbs she leaves on the trail.
(The Enchanted Broccoli Forest is a recipe by Mollie Katzen, published in a book by the same name.)
Emily Macdonald has stories published in anthologies and journals. She was nominated for Best Microfiction 2024. Her collection of driving related stories, Wheel Spin and Traction, is out now with Alien Buddah Press.
Twitter/X: @ek_macdonald
https://www.macdonaldek11.com
Twitter/X: @ek_macdonald
https://www.macdonaldek11.com
