Sour Heat by Ella Hormel
Associate editor Zoa Coudret on today’s bonus story: Ella Hormel's writing drew me in with tangy sensory descriptions of a moment that is usually associated with sadness but here becomes a cause for private celebration.
Sour Heat
Tonight, I am standing in the kitchen naked because he is not here. He always wanted this. He liked the idea of watching me bake naked, but I told him that it was a dumb idea. An easy way to burn myself. But he is not here, and I did not burn myself and the muffins came out beautifully. Each top lightly browned, evenly round, cracked across the center. If he were here he’d probably say: this is my favorite muffin top and grab my stomach and even though I’d laugh in the moment, I’d stare in the mirror later that night feeling disgusted by the way my lower stomach always curves out no matter how much I suck in. But he is not here so I let my stomach hang comfortably. I grab it with two hands and jiggle it. I tap it with the back of a spoon like I do to the muffins when they come out of the oven.
The kitchen that used to be ours smells like hot citrus. He is not here to tell me to open the window and let some cool air in, so I let the sour heat consume me. I imagine that I am a muffin and the kitchen is my warm body. I move through myself. It takes eight hours to digest a muffin and only one hour to bake one. It takes ten years to build a life with someone and only one Saturday afternoon to end it.
Lemon poppy seed was his favorite. I spent years perfecting this recipe. Changing measurements. Finding the perfect lemon—Meyer. Too much baking soda and they will be dry. Too much oil and they will not rise. If the ratios aren’t perfect, the whole batch is wasted. When I told him that I wasn’t sure if I loved him anymore, he didn’t speak to me for hours. Well I guess that’s it then, he eventually said and laughed and laughed and cried and yelled. Heartless, he said, and then he was gone. Then back a week later to gather his things and give me the key to my apartment that was once our apartment. Then gone forever. Ten years wasted, he said.
He liked to cook but he did not like to bake. He said: cooking is an art, baking is a science. I hate science. I hate recipes. He cooked the way he painted. Layers of flavors piled on top of one another. Muddy. Overwhelming. When his mother first met me, she told him that I was cold. She said I was tightly wound, and that a person can only stay that way for so long. I was bound to implode. He told me this years later when I didn’t cry over the death of our tabby cat, Rex. I’m really sad, I told him. Then cry, he said. His mother was right about me. Leave anything in the oven too long and it’ll start a fire. I imagine her now, telling him that he’s better off without me. He’s better off with someone more like him. Someone who cries over the death of a pet.
There is no couch in the living room anymore. He hired a mover to pick it up when he left me. I hadn’t bothered to get a new one. The apartment is the cleanest it’s been in years. I put the TV out on the street. Painted the walls eggshell. I kept one chair. If he were here, he’d probably say: it looks sterile in here. Where is the art? Where is the character? Don’t you feel anything? But he is not here and I don’t have to convince anyone that I’m sad. Tonight I am eating muffins on the living room floor. Tonight I am letting crumbs fall, pile in my lap, disappear into the folds of my body. With each bite, a brief memory—third anniversary, trip to Boca, burst appendix, I love you, fuck you. I hold each one in my mouth until it dissolves, and I’m forced to swallow. Again, and again until nothing is left.
Ella Hormel is an Oakland-based writer and recent graduate of California College of the Arts. Her work has appeared in Hobart Pulp. Find her in the ether @irrellavent.
