Dwelling Solo RPG Session 3: The Honey-Chili Heart
DINING ROOM
In this scene, the narrator wanders into the dining room to check windows after his living room encounter with a spectral ex. There is no draft, but he’s stopped cold when he notices the dining room table is set. He is compelled to sit. From the prompt on page 32: “I can feel the presence of others. Far away, but pressing into me, in the moments it takes me to look up and around I feel surrounded, as if all the empty space around me summoned long-reaching shadows to fill it. In each seat is a tall looming presence, jutting hands that cut at empty plates and reach across the table and over my head, prodding into one another, the tangle of limbs cutting off my view of anything else.”
Summon
I am pinned in the chair. At my right, at the head of the table, a restless and nauseous form. Across the table from me, two more shadows, smaller and stiller. They extend themselves, gingerly exploring the surface and the dishes. I know a roast chicken and a basket of cornbread by outline only in the room’s borrowed light, but the arms evaporate from the distal points inward until the figures are neat columns at right angles to the floor, in abeyance to the writhing night geometry of the thing to my right.
The groans from the head of the table are constant: ohhh what are we going to drone about today at the book club, those stacks of baked dog turds on your desk, you don’t need an editor you need a priest
The being at the head of the table extends out, its shadows crossing us, prodding at the plates and finding no satisfaction, spinning a butter knife crooked.
you don’t trust people like that with their energy and becoming and presence talk, people like that are either sick or lost or they’re hoping whoever’s listening is sick or lost
Worst of all is the contempt I feel. I am disgusted with the mute pillars across the table. This is the most shameful of the obscure family of emotions.
you’re all terrified of writing a single thing except ira, he knows what he’s here for with that yogi smirk putting his chin up in the air with his thumb like this, why don’t you just write your next draft with his dick in your mouth, that’s the breakthrough everybody’s waiting for
It stretches a pseudopod across the table. The band of its shadow thins with the effort. It grabs the chicken shape overhand and lifts it up and I gasp. Against the wash of grays the chicken now hovers at center, full-color and wet as a human heart. The red chile-honey bird implodes here, bulges there as it is squeezed with great force; a leg quarter thumps on the tablecloth, the crisp skin crumples. It finds something it’s looking for in the dorsal, scoops it out and lets the rest hit the plate. In the low light I can’t see what it throws, but the rightmost shadow across from me ripples violently.
here have it its the oyster you love the oyster here stuff this in one of your paradigms
I feel a hand clamp my forearm: “Have you been drinking?” and panic turns me to stone.
Memory
On page 33 of the book I’m prompted to compose a memory, so I took the liberty of using the kitchen for a scene so we could see, at least in part, what led up to the horror in the dining room:
It started out as fun, at least for the boys.
“What we’re going for here is well-constructed comfort food,” J said, putting an extra splash of vodka in my half-full screwdriver. “I need you in a mindset conducive to training.”
It was the the second screwdriver I’d ever had in my life. The first one 10 minutes prior. The elation: having J to myself, the field promotion to kitchen assistant and a rocketing sense of confidence and well-being.
It was easy to drink and it climbed all over me. I decided I very much liked the way my shoes looked against the kitchen floor. They weren’t so beat up or ugly after all, they were ready to dance me far above my station. My shoes were cool and had me planted at the global nerve center of a cynosure that drizzled honeyed success over all who could witness or imagine it.
If AB could only see this, the phone back in Aurora would ring at 10:35 p.m. Her voice would be soft and curious.
“Here, here, see…” J planted his shoulder against me and nudged me along the counter, undoing my sloppy string and beginning again. “Once you start dating more interesting women, you’ll get better at this.”
I caught the joke, tried to tack one on. Typically a good try would get a knowing hmmm that was all in the throat. A laugh, never. I didn’t care if I could cook like him, but I wanted to riff at his level very badly.
“Is Jason going to be able to make this for us at home now?” A delighted Mom face was poking in the door.
“He’s already been scouted once by Arby’s and the Joseph Mengele Culinary Institute,” he purred absently. He ignored Mom’s reprimand and continued amusing himself with some patter to the chicken, smoothly looping the string and tightening. “‘I’m gonna finish you before I’m through with you…’”
I failed my way sideways to other prep jobs in his kitchen. He seemed more amused by my increasing intoxication than my comedy bullpen skills or the battered LL Cool J tape I dug out of my duffel and put on. I tried to show off how many of the rhymes I knew and explain other Def Jam artists. When I thrust the cassette case in front of him, all he said was, “What’s he planning in that hat.”
He had big brown eyes like my Mom that you could read for sensitive if it weren’t for the default expression of mild surprise and boredom that never quite tipped to either. He was tall with a solid medium build and dark curly hair that he left a little longer in the back, but tightly trimmed.
At least once every visit, he’d have us to Genevieve’s, one of three restaurants at the golf resort and hotel where he worked. It always surprised and intimidated me, that exquisite little city appearing out of the woods, which would have remained hidden without J having us in, usually during the tail end of a weekday lunch.
He’d appear in his black chef’s jacket at the kitchen door, directing the waiters with whatever it was that he had, that thing that was coiled in reserve that let him command an entire dinner without being fazed by or invested in any of it. He’d show up with the courses for sly lectures and sit with us late in the meal for a glass of wine once he had the back-of-house crew on track for closing. He might as well have been a decorated war hero to me.
When we went to eat at other places — he always chose — that’s when he’d play, usually at some poor server’s expense:
• Pointing at the menu: “Has this lamb ever faced extradition?”
• Sharing notes on the shrimp during the server’s table checkin: “These taste like dried coat buttons.”
• Resting his knife and fork parallel on the nearly full plate as the manager on duty froze with distress: “This…has no merit.” Mom’s lips pursed in a solemn way at that one. J and Beverly fought about it on the way home.
The lark in the kitchen ended when he sent me out with the blue-and-yellow cornbread with specific instructions on how to present it: “The chicken will be ready shortly,” I slurred after weaving to the table. “Right now it is being evasive and smug.”
That was the end of the music and sneaking drinks in the kitchen. It was functionally the end of the trip. Everybody was in trouble.
Mom rarely put her hands on me. Her grip on my wrist was firm this time: “Have you been drinking?”
***
It was 300 miles back home in Mom’s so-so car, staring at my grimy sneakers during the talk that usually comes in the wake of anger. About Dad’s drinking and that being one of the reasons why he wasn’t at that table anymore; another being that he despised J and didn’t hide it well. Stories from their adolescence. About how he treated Beverly. She said he was hovering in the kitchen doorway, his hand over his mouth and his face ruby red when I brought the cornbread out with the triggering phrase from their last big row. My first laugh line from J, and he’d had to write it.
As I looked back and forth between my shoes and the foothills that meant Denver was soon, I quietly anchored myself on one spot: My Mom was a drag; cerebral, boring Beverly was a drag and my Dad was a drag. I was going to be my own kid after this.
***
I snap back to. There’s a greasy blotch on the right thigh of my sweatpants. The murdered chicken is gone, the figures in the chairs dry into the known hues of an empty dining room at night. I feel the blotch in the fabric; it’s an oil that turns into a bigger smear when I touch it. There’s nothing to wipe it on there’s nothing to wash it with…I hold my right hand up, fingers spread out, scanning the table.
I peer at a noise: There’s a soft sizzle coming from the table. No, not quite a sizzle, more like what you’d imagine to be the sound of mycelia squelching their way through poison soil. It’s the slaw, the pepper slaw is collapsing and rotting. I can hear it fall by sections. I get a bulging surge of pain in my stomach. The sound flattens, then moves. It passes on my right. I turn to track it as it gets louder, heading for the kitchen. This movement and nothing else is what will free me from the chair.