From Scratch
by Gauraa Shekhar
7 A.M.
Every day or two, I’ll receive a message from a friend asking to get dinner and drinks downtown. Every day or two, I’ll scroll past a rest-in-peace post on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook, click on profiles of people who don’t exist anymore. A friend of a friend: gone. I’ll type out my responses to the invites: I’m sorry, we have pre-existing health conditions. Or, I’m sorry, we’re not quite doing that yet, but how about FaceTime? I’ll read the texts aloud to Elliot before I hit send. I’ll ask him, are we being paranoid? Are we being rude? I’ll ask, when are we seeing people again? He won’t have an answer to the last one. An hour later, another post: a friend’s parent, gone.
Monday morning, I add an order of discount blossoms to our grocery list. It would be nice to see something in bloom around here. Blossoms, I think, are another thing to tend to. But when I sanitize the items from the delivery, the only flowers I find turn out to be squash blossoms—the edible kind. You can’t put those in a vase, I hear Elliot chime in from across the room. I know, I tell him, even though I didn’t know. I don’t like being wrong.
I spend the rest of the day putting off work, secreting pockets of time to look up squash blossoms recipes on an incognito window in my browser. I spend the entire evening making stuffing for the flowers: roasted eggplant, cream cheese, garlic, cumin, a hint of lime. I put on a Janet Jackson record as I remove pistils from the blossoms with the tip of kitchen shears.
Why does every song from the early nineties have the same annoying up-beat, I hear Elliot say from the couch, digging between seat cushions for a pair of lost earphones. Why don’t you have better taste, I think, talk myself out of saying, then say aloud anyway. Elliot plugs in his earphones, but when “Any Time, Any Place” comes on, he takes them out again, and sings along to the parts he recognizes from the Kendrick sample.
I’ve been snapping a lot these days. I’ve been short-tempered, rude. Fragile. I say something too quick, too mean, un-editorialized, and wish I could take it back.
Sometimes I worry that by the time it’s safe to see other people, my husband won’t want to see me anymore. I’ve been avoiding the mirror since I last caught my reflection: stray hair trailing the gap between my eyebrows, strands of silver on my head, the same novelty humor t-shirt I’ve had on for four days. I was twenty-four the last time I left our block. I had box-dyed, self-cut, baby-bangs—not a single grey hair to be found.
I fill the blossoms with stuffing, dip them into a batter of oat milk and beer, set them into a frying pan, watch them sizzle golden. I serve them on a bed of chiffonade and quinoa salad. I wait for Elliot to take the first bite. When he’s not looking, I pull the stuffing out of the flowers and eat it with quinoa. The thought of edible floral arrangements makes me sick.
In the middle of the night, I turn toward Elliot. Ask if he still loves me. Half-asleep, he says, I want to make pasta with you one day. We could make it with our hands, cut them into shapes.
The next morning, I type the words into an incognito window—pasta from scratch—and hope that the memory of it hasn’t evaporated like the tail end of a dream.
Gauraa Shekhar is a writer based in Manhattan. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nimrod Journal, Contrary, Sonora Review, The Toast, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She is the Interviews Editor at Maudlin House, and is currently pursuing an MFA candidacy in Fiction at Columbia University.
