Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

He woke up several hours later, thinking about his mother, and how hungry he was. He would give anything for a taste of her land-prawn soup, and a ring-neck sandwich. He wiped tears from his cheeks. “Dad,” he said. “What can I do now?” He just wanted to talk with his father a little, just a nice discussion like they sometimes had.

“Dad, soon I have to find a Sterub trundle spider. I've never seen one, except the small stuffed one at the natural history store in the Kick. A real one can be huge, the size of a giant church bell, the size of a school van. I don't even know if they're extinct. How do I find one, Dad?” Talking to a phantom of his dad only made him miserable. He crawled out of the leaf and stretched. He had to start his next chore, which was to connect the two leaves. He had read how to do it many times, but this was for real. Eukan muscled the leaves around so that knobs that were called the “buttons” on one edge of one leaf, lined up with the pores, or “buttonholes” on the other. It was not so easy to get them to join, or button up, as the books had made it seem. It took him late into the afternoon to get just a few done, and then to loosen the fan-like membranes that served as a rudder and propeller. He worked until dark, and into the night, and when it was nearly complete, he was too tired to admire it himself. He fell asleep again as the sun went down, knowing that when he woke up this time he would have to call out the Sterub , and that would be it.

It was another dawn when he awoke to thunder. Dark clouds tumbled over the mountains. He didn't want the boat to fill with water. Sometimes they spoiled, he'd read, when that happened before the trundle spider did its work. He began the long incantation that was supposed to summon this recalcitrant creature, a creature that was so huge, and yet ate nothing but the aphids off of dew-thistles. He sang this in a language he didn't understand himself, except for this peculiar translation of one of the quatrains:

O, spider, your day for me is here ,

And I grant you all my particular wow.

This is the boat of my way to clear.

I invoke you, appear and touch its bow.

The rest was in the language of the Etatreh people. He chanted the whole incantation once, then chanted this again. He pressed himself against the trunk of a tree when the rain shower started. Was he supposed to go on chanting in the rain? Was he supposed to combine the chant with some kind of search? It seemed like empty hocus pocus, suddenly. Cutting leaf was one thing. It was an activity, at least. He was doing something. But this was unfamiliar magic. He kept the incantation going anyway, without listening to himself, as the shower ceased. “O, spider… ” he went on. Suddenly, from around the exact place where he had been sitting before the rain started, something began to move. Then what sounded like an enormous yawn came out of the earth right there as a huge thing heaved itself up from the exact tuffet where he had been resting. Then a sigh came out, and he saw what was its identifying feature, its one humanlike eye. It stared directly at Eukan, and blinked. Another high-pitched sigh came out of it. “Yes, yes, yes!” Eukan filled with joy as the enormous thing turned and trundled over to his buttoned leaves, wheezing like an old bachelor who gets out of bed just before dawn to light the stove under the coffee pot.

She walked in the front door, glanced into the kitchen, and realized she'd better stay away. If a bomb had hit the kitchen, it couldn't have done more damage. As she was hanging her jacket in the hall closet, she heard a thud and turned to see a white cloud blow from the kitchen door. A bag of flour had probably hit the floor. When Sitund cooked he always bought it in forty-three pound bags. She didn't know how he did it. If she tried she couldn't scatter ingredients around the room and throughout the house as widely as he did. And he did this so lovingly. The Noride nuts had been scattered clear across the living-room carpet, as if he didn't want anyone to miss them. She picked up a line of tiny, pricey Thwyneg Trowlap apples Sitund had laid down all the way from the kitchen to the bathroom, as if he needed this trace to find his way back from one to the other. She tasted one. It was like biting into a baby's eye, and it was sweet. As she stepped onto what looked like the field of battle, Sitund in his “Kiss Me I'm A Kitchen Slave” apron reached out for her and scattered the Trober beans across all the counters.

“Sweetheart, are you cooking or redecorating?” She swept some beans aside on the counter to lay down the tub of butter she'd retrieved from off the toilet tank.

“Shut up, beautiful, beautiful wife,” he said. “I'm right in the middle of this.” They kissed, and he sighed, feigning a melt to the floor. “I can't take it. You'll have to leave, or else I won't ever live to cook again.”

“O, my goodness. The melodrama of my man in the kitchen.”

“Shut up.” He turned back to his mixing bowl. “I have to concentrate on this. I decided to do my Yonoletenus this way I never did it before. I always laid it on a bed of feathers. This time I'm making a crust, chopping the feathers and sticking them to a coating of ground Noride nuts in a purée of Trobet beans. The apples are for stuffing. If I get this just right when I crack it the feathers will separate from the crust, which I can halve into two tasty bowls for vegetables and stuffing. Edible bowls is a great idea.” His grin, when he looked at her, made him look really stupid, she thought, but lovable. “So I have to mix it all now, and let it ripen in the refrigerator for three days.”

“Then I can't touch you? I can't even kiss you right now? I can't grab your… ”

“Shut up. No, I don't mean shut up , but please shut up. I just need quiet, to concentrate on this. The mixture reaches this critical consistency, and then you drizzle in the buttermilk as soon as the batter starts to dimple. So I have to… ”

“After that you'll grab me, and tear off all my clothes, and ravage me across the carpet, through the spilled nuts and beans, and your fingers and your lips will… ”

“Shut up… shut up, please!”

Yerml loved to see him so intense, and so domesticated. “We'll wait and see,” she said.

“You won't be disappointed,” sang her husband.

Yerml turned to see Dojie listening in the doorway, but she headed back upstairs, as soon as her mother looked her way. How much had she heard, Yerml wondered. And what difference did it make? She wasn't about to change things to protect her daughter. It finally had happened that after all this apathy, humdrum family life, tired old marriage, they were ready again to mush each other up every second. It was so rejuvenating. She wasn't going to change this, not even if it confused and embarrassed the kids. She was determined to keep it going, this husband and wife, transported by resurgence of passion. And they couldn't neglect their kids, not so much Dojie, who had this nasty teenage reaction to whatever they did, and they just had to put up with it, to wait her out; but Eukan, who was at that tender age, that stage of developmental succulence. They had to tend to him as carefully as Sitund watched the consistency of his batter.

“Dojie,” she called from the bottom of the stairwell. She usually had to call at least three times to get a response. She took a couple of steps up. “Dooooojieee.” No response yet. “Dojie, come down here a minute, please.”

The door to Dojie's room cracked slightly, “What?” she whined.

“Come down here just a minute.”

“Right now? I'm busy, mom.”

“Right now, Dojie. When I say so. I'm your mother.”

“Big and bushy, my female prog,” she mumbled, as she patted her foot dry after the third soak.