Meringue
Breathe in. Breathe out. Quiet contemplation. Of all-natural unbleached sugar. And free-range organic eggs. And an oven preheated to three hundred twenty-five degrees. And when at last she attained perfect awareness, she found herself transformed into a mound of meringue.
“Damn it, Althea, what were you thinking? You should have climbed into the refrigerator before meditating on meringue. Or at least thought to turn down the heat.”
She was perspiring already, and she could feel her peaks beginning to droop. For just a moment she thought maybe, before it was too late, she could imagine herself back into her former humanity, but she quickly abandoned the idea. It was one thing for a person to contemplate herself into a meringue, but it was asinine to expect a meringue to effect the reciprocal transformation. A meringue could never manifest the necessary level of awareness. Still, futile though she knew it to be, she couldn’t help pondering coolness, freshness, artificial preservatives....
After a while – she couldn’t be sure how long a while, her thought processes having undergone considerable mechanical deterioration – she felt a welcome draft of cold air, and she heard Steven’s voice.
“Althea? I picked up some Chinese.”
It took a couple of seconds for Steven’s brain to assemble from his raw perceptions the realization that he had, in fact, come home to find an enormous meringue sitting in the middle of the living room. And another second to patch together the appropriate response. He slammed the door and rushed past the meringue and into the kitchen. He dropped the Chinese on the counter and rummaged in a drawer.
“Althea! Althea! Hurry up! I brought you a spoon!” He had always been a tad impatient. “Okay then, do you mind if I start without you? Althea?”
Hearing no protest, he went ahead, taking the first bite from the top of the mound. Mmmm. Delicious. Really delicious. In fact, he was sure it was the best meringue he ever had: It had just the right texture, at first firm then slowly melting on his tongue. It was sweet but not cloying, with a delicate under-palate he couldn’t quite define. It was the meringue of a lifetime, nothing less, and he knelt on the floor and gobbled it up.
When it was gone, he felt guilty – not leaving a single bite for Althea or even so much as a lick of the spoon. And he felt somehow nostalgic, and he was sad that it was gone. He told himself he should have exercised restraint, taking just a bite or two and putting the rest in the fridge, allowing himself just a taste everyday and making it last as long as he could.
But he was being silly. It was, after all, just a meringue. What was so special about it anyway? Nothing but sugar and some egg whites. It was mostly air. Something about the way it was whipped – more a technique, really, than a thing-in-itself, little more than a clever trick. And of course, it could not be healthy. The cholesterol had to be through the roof. And there was the cavity he feared he was getting in that molar on the left. And then there was the big greasy stain it left on the carpet. So much for getting the security deposit back. Why would Althea bring home something like that in the first place? What was she thinking? Clearly, it was best it was gone, that it was out of their lives.
“Althea? What are you doing?” he called into the hallway. “Hurry up. The Chinese is getting cold.”
He put his spoon in the dishwasher and Althea’s back in the drawer. He took a can of fabric cleaner from under the sink and a towel from the refrigerator door and carried them into the den. He shook the can a few times, hard, and aimed it at the carpet. He held it approximately twelve inches from the surface, pressed the nozzle, fanned slowly side to side – just like the directions on the back of the can said – and covered the spot in a blanket of foam.
– Don Hucks is a Pushcart Prize nominee whose fiction has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Pedestal, decomP, Bartleby Snopes, Pindeldyboz, and Ghoti.
Also by Don Hucks: "Auxiliary"
