LAPIN

short story originally published in WORMS Magazine

Nell heaved the stock pot from the bowels of the restaurant, the wet concrete cellar lit by a string of bulbs like a mineshaft. Chef’s voice got louder and louder as she ascended the stairs.

“They’re dead!”

Nell shoved the pot through the kitchen door to see Chef groaning over a case of wilted, wincing snow peas, sickly yellow along their seam.

“How am I supposed to pay you for this shit?” she barked into her cell-phone.

Over Chef’s shoulder, Simone pulled the neck of her white jacket in a cartoonish yikes motion, laughing to Uriel who replied with a slow, lashy blink.

“It doesn’t matter if they were fresh when you packed them.”

Nell lifted the pot into Chef’s eye-line for approval. Simone cut a hand across her throat, not now babe. Nell blushed, lowering the pot.

“Yes. I am quite aware that the air is toxic, but we both still need to make a living.”

She pressed the heel of her palm to her eye while the farmer yammered through the phone speaker.

“I don’t have time for this,” Chef cut him off, scraping a gnarled hand through her short, thinning hair. “I’ve got to re-write the menu. Again. Just, stop sending me dead shit. If at all possible. Fuck.”

Chef hung up and looked at the pot hanging limply from Nell’s arms.

“No, a rondeau. Wide. Round. Short walls.” Chef made a circle with her stout, muscular arms. “Can someone – someone show her? Please.”

Chef unpacked the delivery from the farm, the tarragon blackened, the little gem lettuces necrotised. She slammed the survivors onto the counter: potatoes, turnips, onions, gamey meat.

“We’ll make Lapin à la Moutarde. With this godforsaken apocalyptic bullshit. Does anyone know how to debone a rabbit?”

Uriel raised his hand. Chef reached into a box and held up a mauve little corpse.

“By all means, demonstrate.”

Uriel pulled a thin blade from the wall of knives and took the rabbit from Chef’s hand, unmooring the flesh from its skeleton in a matter of seconds. The bones hit the bottom of a trashcan with a thwack. Hot blood rose into Nell’s cheeks.

“Perfect.”

Chef gathered the ingredients: onions, garlic, dijon, chicken stock, cream, white wine.

“Today I’ll make it, tomorrow you’ll take over. So watch me while you work. Nell, just focus on the soup. Yesterday you finished it way too late. And it was watery. It needs.”

Simone instructed Nell, her face spidered with premature smile lines and green, faded tattoos.

“You’ll start with a hotel pan of sliced onions cooked gently, three ramekins of peeled garlic, coriander and fennel seeds toasted then blitzed, eight pounds of diced potatoes…” Simone monologued while Nell piled onions onto her cutting board, peeling and slicing as fast as she could. Some pieces were spindly, some thick and awkward. Simone smirked down at her sloppy handiwork. Sensing her judgement, Nell tried to cut thin, uniform slices, moving at half the speed while Simone chattered.

“The farmer’s a doomsdayer, only wants to grow shit that would survive a rapture. I think he’s trying to send Chef a message.”

Nell lit a flame under the rondeau and poured her onions onto the heat. She piled garlic on her board, peeling white, smooth cloves with trembling hands.

“What message?”

Simone lowered her voice.

“This kind of food is obsolete. Borrowed time baby.”

Nell looked into the pot. The thinner onions were scorched. She tried to scoop out the burnt pieces with a wooden spoon but they slipped off. She reached in with her hand, searing the pads of her fingers. As Chef’s eyes scanned the room she shoved the stringy, steaming onions into her pocket.

“Uriel,” Chef called across the kitchen.

“Yes Chef?”

“Think you can use this for family meal? Farm sent it to try.”

She held up a container with a sly smile, shook it like a box of cereal.

“What is it?”

“Crickets.”

He was silent for a beat. Blinked.

“Yes Chef.”

Uriel toasted the bugs with hazelnuts and ground them into a tortoise-shell powder, hesitating before pouring the mixture into a mole sauce bubbling on the stove. He pulled a tiny orange pepper from the pocket of his apron, julienning it in the time it took for Nell’s pulse to pick up speed. He tossed the pepper with red onion, vinegar, a glug of oil, salt. He flung the gleaming vegetables into the air and back into the silver bowl.

Uriel’s acne scars glowed like the lip of a shell. He wore blue jeans with his chef whites, soft like oilcloth and sitting high on his ass. His pert posture was that of a young monk, pious and dignified. Nell was woozy with envy and the first strains of blind love. His head whipped to catch her look, eyes flicking to her lack of progress. Judgement cut across the room and a clove of garlic slipped from her hand and onto the ground.

“Almost there.” Simone said to Nell with a wink. Simone’s smile revealed small, dim, glassy teeth.

“How do you get faster?” Nell asked.

“You just… move faster. There’s no secret. It’s your first week. Don’t take it all so personally.”

Nell slouched at her comment, looking down at her already scraped hands, skin peeling and red at the cracks between her fingers.

“Family,” Uriel grunted.

He plopped the pan onto a plywood table. They sat around the mole on milk crates. Nell dragged a hunk of bread through the glossy brown sauce dotted with the pink and orange pickle. It tasted alchemic and righteous. Deep dark chocolate spiked with habanero. Nell wanted to dive across their debauched plates and send them both bloated to the ground.

The prep-team exited, weary, into perpetual night as the line cooks streamed in for service. Nell strapped her respirator to her head and walked to the train station. Uriel sealed himself into his shitty brown car and merged into thick traffic. Simone lingered at the bar with a drink to ease the journey home.

“Aaaah, my gorgeous foamy pint. Like a leggy woman,” and she slurped it up. Then another.

Nell trudged along on the hushed, bruise-purple sidewalk, a wildfire of headlights edging next to her. Through the haze, the rim of a late afternoon sun. Soot. Ozone. Sulfur oxides. Exhaust. Smoke, with no rain to wash it down. Worst in the cities, the pallor worked its way over the world.

Nell passed a valet wearing a vest, tie and a gas mask. Then another in a glass box smoking a cigarette. The valets waited to ferry cars into hermetically sealed garages while patrons ascended into immaculate dining rooms.

She imagined the rabbit pulled from its velvety blanket of oil, revived in the blazing wood-fired oven. Returned to a bed of its juices and hit with a few drops of vinegar and powder-fine chives. Placed on the pass by one of those elusive line cooks, ferried in a terracotta dish to a linen-dressed table. Gamey flesh torn, dragged across the plate, lifted to those rich lips… and so on.

Nell dragged her leaden feet through the turnstile. She slowed next to Sherla who sat just inside the station, wringing the neck of her blanket.

“I’m sick of you motherfuckers! Walking in my shadows!“

Nell picked up speed, rushing onto a train as it pulled into the station.

Closing her apartment door behind her, she let her respirator drop to the floor. Even the air inside was rough and wheezy. Nell stuck her keys in her pocket, hitting sticky mush. She pulled out her hand and with it, the scorched onion, wiping the mess onto her pants. Suddenly furious, she shoved everything off, kicking the pile of soiled pants-shirt-panties-socks to hit the far wall of her tiny room.

Neon orange powder exploded across the black, linoleum counter-top. Nell scooped mac and cheese directly from the pot into her mouth, the red coil of the hotplate still glowing. She took a gulp of water from the sink, then stayed under the flow, letting the water run over her face.

Tucked into her leather couch, she listened to the stray cat yowl in the courtyard below. She wished she could pull it from the black mist and crush its body to her own while feeding it Vienna sausages from the can in the cupboard.

5:00am, the alarm squealed. Wet achey de-latching from sleep. Nell lurched out of bed and into her pants and out the door. Those who labour, heavy laden, come onto me, blared the billboard towering above the train station, lit in a harsh fluorescent spotlight. Sherla lay next to the turnstile on her polyester-plush blanket patterned with laughing pigs.

“Good morning,” she said in a soft, silvery voice.

“Good morning,” Nell whispered back.

Hours into their shift, as the sun rose behind its curtain of silt, Chef unbuttoned her double-breasted uniform and pulled a set of car keys off a hook. Simone looked up from cleaning her knife.

“Going somewhere?” Simone asked.

“I’m picking up the farm delivery myself. I have to talk to that worm face-to-face.”

Simone looked at Nell slumped over a pile of onions, peeling them with fugued hands.

“You should take Nell, she hasn’t seen the farm yet.”

Nell looked up nervously.

“But – the soup.”

Chef raised her eyebrows at Simone. Uriel ignored them all, knife sprinting through a pile of fennel fronds.

“We got it Chef,” Simone said with a crooked, glassy smile.

“Alright, come on,” Chef said to Nell, leaving towards the parking lot.

Nell looked to Simone.

“I don’t know if I want to be alone in the car with her,” she whispered.

“Don’t worry, she doesn’t talk. You can just sleep or zone out.”

They drove out of the dining district through a series of overpasses crowded with tents. Lanterns, headlights and garbage fires cut through the blackened air. They passed the city limits and edged along the freeway, past a burnt out mall and a gated community reinforced with razor-wire. As suburban structures thinned into yellow hills, layers of grime peeled back to reveal a cream-colored sky. The car turned off the highway, rumbling down a rough gravel road. Finally they passed a hand-painted sign: a crude still-life of vines and bean-pods wrapped around the words: Paradise Organic Farms.

Chef parked the van next to a truck and a weather-worn green cottage. All around was an expanse of dead fields pockmarked with resilient weeds. The farmer jogged down a dirt path to the van, sheepish smile already in place. No respirator, but a holstered gun at his hip.

“Is the air clean enough out here?” Nell asked before leaving the car.

Chef gave her a look.

“You’ll be fine.”

Chef got out of the car and extended a cool hand to the farmer. He leaned forward and took it in an over-the-top display of deference, smile tight and ironic. Nell closed the passenger seat door behind her. His eyes softened as he shook her hand and she smiled up into his wet amber look.

“This shouldn’t take long. Feel free to roam,” Chef turned to her like an afterthought.

Chef and the farmer walked off together, him bending to her short, authoritative stature. Nell wandered, passing a line of empty, neglected chicken coops to approach a pen teeming with rabbits. She reached into the enclosure and swished her hand through the downy, twitching carpet, their bodies rippling away.

Nell noticed a thick chirping sound, like mothwings fluttering against a window and cans being crushed. She followed it into an enclosure lit with heat lamps. Crickets hopped beneath mesh in low wood boxes of dark soil. Leaning beneath the lamp to feel it on her cheeks, she heard the murmur of Chef and the farmer’s voices approaching.

“This is where we incubate the eggs.”

entered and looked through the mesh roof of the cricket village. He pointed to a pile of shredded egg cartons.

“Crickets contain more protein per gram than beef, chicken –”

“I run a French restaurant, not a disaster shelter.”

“If you could adapt you might avoid the latter. ”

“I can feed crickets to my staff, sure. Do you have anything I can serve my customers, other than rabbit?”

“If you want a steroid-pumped, diseased, factory chicken, be my guest. You want farm-to-table? This is it.”

The farmer noticed Nell watching them.

“Have you seen the greenhouse yet? It’s just through that doorway.”

Nell took the hint and moved towards the greenhouse, the sound of their bickering fading behind her as she pushed through the squeaky door. Her lungs ballooned with luscious air, tongue awakening to the animalistic taste of fertiliser and plants freshly watered. An erotic sadness overtook her, eyes glazing with tears. She buried her hands in warm damp leaves, along the firm puckered skin of the cucumbers. She pulled one off its vine and gnashed her teeth into its bursting verdancy, cool water dripping down her chin. She coiled herself in the narrow passage between plants. The nourishing humidity put her to sleep.

Later, Chef stood over her. She placed a hand on Nell’s knee, wedged up against her chest.

“Hey, wake up.”

Back in the kitchen, Nell rebuttoned her uniform, watching Simone and Uriel debone rabbits with sharp, finger-thin blades. Bodies overflowed out of a hotel pan, skeletons in a plastic bucket on the floor. Uriel’s blade was like quicksilver, flick-flicking breast from breastplate. He looked back at her while swiping his knife along the spine, blind.

“You want to learn how to do this?”

He stepped aside and handed Nell the knife, placing a fresh rabbit on the butcher block. A slice along the spine, a firm grip to pop the leg joint out of its socket, two incisions along the femur, run your finger under the bone to detach connective tissue, follow the gentle sloping ribs. Nell slowly worked the body from its bones. She placed her knife next to the flayed rabbit.

“Yay! Nice job!” Simone cheered.

“Another one,” Uriel instructed. Nell picked up the knife.

Pushing into the turnstile, Sherla’s spot was empty. On the display screen, the orange dots scrambled across their matrix to read: TRAIN CANCELLED. A train worker peered over the edge of the platform. Stomach dropping, Nell stood next to him, not looking down in fear of seeing Sherla’s crushed body.

“What happened?”

He pointed. Nell’s gaze followed his finger to a family of doves tucked along the steel rail.

“They fell from the rafters.”

A grey mother fluffed her feathers, trying to engulf her mottled chicks back into her body. There was Sherla on the tracks, creeping toward them, imitating their soft moans, ignoring the sharp call from the train worker to get off the tracks. She held her pink blanket aloft like a net until it flew over the doves and she embraced them oh-so-gently into a cooing bundle. Sherla turned to Nell with a huge, frail smile, who in return extended her arms to hoist Sherla and the doves back onto the platform.

Then, the tack tack tack of rain against the roof. Nell left the station and tore off her respirator. Rain schlocked onto the sidewalk, washing the air. Soiled pools gathered in the gutters and pot holes and other divots of the world, an unnatural, fecal violet. Nell watched, barefaced. Soaking. She began the long walk to her apartment.

“Hey!”

She tracked the voice to a cracked window in a familiar brown car. Nell approached and pressed her eyes to the crack, seeing Uriel in the driver’s seat, his thick brows pressed together.

“What are you doing?”

“My train was cancelled.”

“Well, get in.”

Sliding into the passenger side, she breathed in the smell of wet leather and shifted in her seat.

“A dove nest fell on the tracks.”

“Where do you live?”

“Yeah they lived, this woman saved them –”

“– no, where do you live? I’ll give you a ride.”

“Oh.”

She directed him to her street of tall sooty buildings, the many crooked balconies unused. He pulled in front of her complex and turned his hazards on. They sat in the car, rain pounding the roof.

“Do you want to come see?”

“Your apartment?”

“Yeah, maybe you’re curious.”

He let out a surprised laugh.

“Sorry, oh my god why would you be curious. Thanks for the ride.”

She jiggled the door handle.

“Why wouldn’t I be curious?”

He followed her up the stairwell, their wet rubber clogs squeak-squeaking. From behind apartment doors: sounds of television and murmured phone calls, a mother scolding her child and mortifying lovemaking.

She unlatched the deadbolt and stepped into the center of the room, turning as if to present herself, Uriel braced in the doorway. He looked at her leather pull-out couch, the ghostly shape where her body’s oils imprinted in sleep, the black tape holding up the crumbling tiles above her hot plate. He looked at the abalone shell with the melted candle inside, then at Nell – her thin skin guileless to the red humiliation gushing underneath.

He took two quick, sturdy steps into her room and planted a warm kiss on the edge of her mouth. Murky rainwater commingled. His serious face transformed into pure mischief. He stepped back into the doorway.

“See you tomorrow, Nell.”

Then just the door closing, his body squeaking down the stairs, and one wicked, gorgeous laugh from the bottom of the stairwell which cut through all those condemned rooms and lashed against Nell’s belly.

On her leather couch she watched the city’s first visible sunset in months. The cat watched too, down below, letting out strange languorous cries. Dayglow orange light travelled across Nell’s face as she came, garlicky hand shoved down her panties.

At work the next day her knife, slow and diligent, processed the onions into even slices. She kept watch as they steamed in their juices to soft sweetness. The garlic descended into the oil casually, as did the diced potatoes, herbs and spices. The vegetables found tenderness, turning their broth to burbling velvet. No one watched as she made a simple soup properly.

Then, a wail filled the room. Nell jumped thinking it was that damn lonely cat. The sound clarified into a siren blaring from many circling helicopters.

“Did anyone get an emergency alert?!” Chef barked.

Simone pulled out her phone.

“No service.”

Uriel looked up from his.

“Me neither.”

A distorted crackling voice screeched through the walls.

“Shelter in place. Shelter in place. Shelter in –”

Nell’s pot burbled, Uriel stirred a pan of toasting nuts so they wouldn’t burn.

“I mean, is service cancelled? Is this real?” Simone asked, phone in one hand, knife in the other.

“Just, let me see. Let me figure it out,” Chef refreshed her phone.

The lights went out. Nothing but the blue-red flicker of the burners and the sound of sirens.

Line cooks and waitstaff dressed in starched chef whites or black button down shirts, streamed nervously into the cellar, murmuring amongst themselves. Is it the air? Is it a bomb? Is it a tsunami? Everyone sat on the cement floor among the old French wines and backstock of dry goods, sacks of flour and beans, bottles upon bottles of olive oil and cooking wine. Simone’s eyes roved. An hour passed. Nell caught the clipped ends of anxious conversation: This is the one, I can feel it, we’re fucked; Of course I’m gonna die at work; How long is the generator gonna last?; I’m so hungry; Can I leave, like do I have to stay here, can I be with my family?

Everyone looked to Chef. Under the mass gaze, her mouth opened and closed helplessly. A stomp cut through the panic. Simone climbed onto a milkcrate and lifted a bottle of vintage champagne into the air. She levered the cork with the back of a knife. Pop, a stream of foam splattered across the floor and onto a scrawny waiter. She smiled down at them, champagne running down her fingers.

“Mutiny!”

She sucked down the bottle. A pirate’s cry arced across the room. Chef’s head fell into her hands. They uncorked vintages, tore gold foil off of baking chocolate, a line cook and a waiter coiled in a lurid embrace. Simone egged them on.

Nell longed for her soup, perfect and simple, sitting hot on the burner. She darted up the stairs unnoticed. With the miraculous strength found in crisis, she slowly lugged the sloshing pot down the stairs, carefully lifting it onto each step so as to not lose a drop, until finally it hit the cellar floor. In the raucousness, Nell and the pot went unnoticed. She searched the crowd for Simone’s help, finding her wasted and horizontal, feeling up a waitress. A sharp intake of breath.

“SOUP!” Nell bellowed, her voice cracking over boldness.

Everyone turned, cheered, and crowded around the steaming pot. Nell served them, grazed with rough fingers and thank yous.

Chef sat in the corner, crying quietly. Nell knelt next to her with a bowl of soup.

“Are you okay?”

“I just. Don’t want it to end.”

“The world?”

“No, the restaurant. This kind of food…eating for pleasure is over. I can feel it. It’s over. It’s all over.”

Chef’s voice faded as Nell thought about the rabbits at the farm, how they multiplied into endless warm, twitching bodies that moved like water at her touch. Hop hop hop, they rippled away to more fucking, eating, sleep and birth.

Against the far wall, Uriel sat with a bowl balanced on his knee and an open bottle of cooking wine at his hip. He held the soup to his mouth and drank, eyes smiling over the rim at Nell.

The rabbit at the whim of the knife, segmented, breast from breast. The touch of labour slips a body into tender stew.

In the windowless cellar, Nell pulled a long gulp of red wine, grapes harvested in 1965 under a hot, clear sky. Then a slurp of her creamy soup. Simone’s drunk, strangled voice rose above the emergency siren. Fear was howled down by some riotous shanty song

.