"I lived in southern Louisiana for a few months over 30 years ago, and what impressed me most was the culture — and the passion — of the Cajun people. This story carries that same passion."
Two slabs of raw meat hit the face of the skillet and hissed, sending beads of fat skipping to the charred edges of overcooked garlic. Lucie studied the lines of blood marbled in with pink pork flesh and exposed bone. The lovely gore of it put an ache in her throat, briefly choking off the searing taste of rage on the tip of her mind.
The name came out of his pants pocket, scrawled on the back of a napkin — Adèle — right below a date, a time, and a sausage grease stain. It's nothing, cher, Claude said. "Nothing," like the extra hour or two that were strangely carved from his commute to Baton Rouge, from his forty-hours-plus-overtime, from a run down to Girard's for a haircut.
Lucie shoveled up a handful of chopped onion that was pushing expiration and dumped it in the pan. The sudden assault on her nostrils wrenched her insides, and she leaned back until the stinking steam dissipated into the kitchen air. It was more than enough onion; she'd cut way too much. But after eying the soggy, mutilated remains on the cutting board, she grabbed up the last of it and piled it into the pan, too.
She thought of pepper, paprika, cayenne, and sage — PawPaw's harmony of spices drawn across the palate like a fine bow over the belly of his fiddle. When he played, a steaming rhythm beat in every breast and melted those silly girls where they stood. He taught Lucie to play, and to waltz, and he taught her the clean way to cook a pig. By perfectly tuned Cajun intuition, she could dash and sprinkle a flavor that would give Claude a big fat hard-on before he even put his knees under the table.
Lucie was inspired to dash and sprinkle skull and brain fluid. Hog's head cheese.
"Easy on the onion, beb," Claude called from the couch.
Lucie sunk her teeth into her tongue and pulled the knife through a damp paper towel. The blade parted through the fiber to her fingerprints, dividing arch and whorl. In the anesthetic instant just before blood rolled out from the wound and spilled down onto Claude's thick cuts of swine, the memory of a melody smothered the impulse to cry out, to run to the sink, to stop the bleeding.
Instead, Lucie turned her palm to the heat and let her thoughts drain out across burned garlic, onion, and sinew. PawPaw would be proud. If there were one thing Lucie could do better than anyone else in all Acadiana, it was cook a pig.
Cochon de lait - Fr.; literally "pig in milk"; suckling pig; a Cajun method of roasting a whole piglet.
L. 'Ailina Laranang was born in Hawai'i and raised in Louisiana where she lives with her husband and five home schooled children. Her fiction, parenting articles, and art have appeared in The Danforth Review, AcadianaMoms, and The Louisiana Review. Contact 'Ailina at alaranang@gmail.com.