Jeremy pulled a bag of tomatoes out
of the refrigerator and handed it to me.
“Cut these up into small bits,
okay? Don’t put them in, um…put them in a bowl, so I can put them in later, you
know?”
I took the bag over to the counter,
took down a cutting board from where it leaned against the backsplash, and
asked, “How many?”
“Um, cut up a couple and show me
how much they make.”
He went back to the fridge, looking
at what was in it. He cackled with delight and puled out the jar of pickled
cocktail onions.
“Oh, Golly, I’ll have to put all of
these in!”
“Oh, yeah! They’ll be, like,
eyeballs!”
“I’ll put them in at the last
minute, too, like the tomatoes.”
“Maybe it should just be a cold soup,
like, uh…I forget what they call it, but there are some kinds of soup where they
make it up cold, and don’t cook it at all”
Jeremy looked thoughtful. The “ghoul-ash”
we were preparing for the Halloween party was going to be based mainly on V-8
juice and beef bouillon, so we knew it couldn’t be cooked very much anyway.
“Yeah, let’s. Cold soul will be
kind of ghoulish by itself.”
The only thing we wound up cooking
was a couple of chicken thighs that we boned and then baked and chopped up. We
made a small pot of “Ghast-ash (Vegetarian)” to put on the buffet table as
well, with no chicken and vegetable bouillon.
Prepping that meal in Jeremy’s
mother’s kitchen turned out to be the happiest Halloween I ever had. Just
before we finished, he kissed me. I hadn’t even been sure he liked me that
much, or that he was even gay.
https://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/poetry/when-i-am-among-trees
[Because at the last minute, the
host decided the poem about goulash was too much of a downer.]
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