EDITOR'S PICKS
Vanitha Sankaran's Pick:
Variety
by Marian Kensler
"The way to a man's heart is through his stomach."
Roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, baked potatoes, buttered beans, fried apples and onions, banana cream pie, strong tea — it wasn't the most conventional Thanksgiving dinner, but few potential diners would have complained, except for the one now sitting down at the table. He looked at the repast spread before him, and his mouth pursed in dismay.
"It looks...nice," he said, finally.
"Don't say that!" she cried. "You always give me these mealy little compliments and then end up throwing away nine-tenths of the food. Look, tell me what you want to eat, why won't you? Just tell me something that won't make you sick!"
"Hon, don't be like that, please don't." He was whining. She hated how he whined.
"Then what do you want?"
"Your hamburgers with onions are good." He bowed his head, as if anticipating a blow.
"I meant besides that! How can we have hamburgers on Thanksgiving?"
"I just really like them. I don't know why, but nothing else tastes quite like they do."
"This does. Go ahead, just a few bites. It's Thanksgiving."
He swallowed one pea-sized morsel of Yorkshire pudding.
"You know," he said after a pause, "I think I'd really like a hamburger."
It was seven months since the day that he had taken her in his arms and said that she was the most beautiful, divinely talented woman he had ever met, and that he would die without her. Seven months since they had married — their courthouse wedding had been performed the next day, and he had uprooted himself and moved halfway across town to be with her. She had been delighted. She might have been made to leave cooking school after less than a year, but now she finally had her devoted, eternal audience of one, and that one a very presentable man no less. She would cook anything she wanted — experiment with strange ingredients, or whip up something that would make the most cynical poseur in the world blubber over the thought of home and apple pie. Her audience adored her unconditionally, and he would adore her cooking as well. The walls would echo with his appreciative sighs, and she would know that whatever the world thought, she really was the best cook in the world.
That had been the plan on the night he proposed. They had been dating only two weeks, and he had not seemed especially interested, but he had consented to come over when she told him she was making hamburgers. When the evening was over, he was ready to swear over his soul to her if she would only make them again. She was happy to do so. The night after that, he wanted them again, and the night after that ... she began to cringe at the sight of ground beef, chop the onions viciously, put so much sage in the mix that surely he would beg for something else.
He never did.
That Thanksgiving night, after he was replete with hamburgers, he lay dozing on the sofa watching a movie. She went to the closet and got out her coat.
"Where are you going?"
"Out. For good."
"Hon — no! How will I —" he hesitated, then blurted out his biggest concern. "What will I eat?"
"Hamburgers, if you must," she said. "But I won't make them."
She grabbed her purse from the hall table and walked out the door. Let him starve if he really couldn't live without her hamburgers. It had all been a mistake from the start. The recipe books told you that mixing your monthly blood in a man's food would make him yours forever. They didn't tell you that it would also make him no longer worth having — at least to someone who liked a little variety in her kitchen.
Marian Kensler lives in Salt Lake City. She appeared previously in flashquake in Spring 2004 ().