Food for afterwards

Kkwabaegi from Small Mercies. S has been talking about them for months. You choose the lemon glazed and an oat iced latte. S has the salted caramel and an Einspänner. You eat them in the park that is shaped like a bowl. Sticky fingers, childlike wonder at how soft. You haven’t slept. Lie on your back and tell her what he said.

Pavlova. One of your aunts brought it for Christmas lunch. Not homemade, but topped with green kiwifruit and strawberries and halved Guylian seashells. It looks festive and silly, the shells like so many misshapen chocolate hats. You eat two bowlfuls under the marquee in the garden; try twice to get the feeling inside you.

Cherries. Handfuls of them lifted from the punnet and placed on your stomach. Lying on your back in the spare room, the only one left awake. Put each one in your mouth, slowly; snap the skin with your teeth. Work out the stone. Don’t choke.

Two soft-boiled eggs with spring onion oil and salt, by the river, in L’s camp chairs. Squooge of yolk: they are exactly right. Cucumber salad made with the snappy new cucumbers from her garden and Lao Gan Ma. Two thin sourdough discard pancakes each. Apricots. Inky plums. Nobody comes down to the waterhole the three hours you sit there in matching swimsuits, talking about everything: your parents, angels, tomatoes, compost. Unbelievable to feel this close to anybody. But when you dive under the cold water you are alone in your sensation, like always.

Por Por’s chicken and vegetables. Marinate two chicken thighs with soy sauce, finely chopped garlic and ginger, spring onion, and a little cornstarch for a few hours. Pan-fry over medium heat for five minutes. In a little oil, pan-fry petals of onion, a little garlic, spring onion, sliced shiitake mushrooms, and large broccoli florets. Add salt, water, rice wine, soy sauce, pinch of cornstarch. Cook to a thin sauce. Serve over white rice, to the soundtrack of the six o’clock news; hear that California’s burning, under the photographs from childhood.

Almond Magnum. Shoes off on the grass in the city’s biggest park. Sunglasses over tired eyes. You chose it almost entirely for the satisfying way the almonds snap in the mouth. You crave that snap. Behind you three little girls poke around under a tree with a stick. They find a dead bird, scream themselves hoarse, run away, come back, shall we touch it? Can you lift it with the stick? You will not turn around. Behind you they investigate a dead thing, while the chocolate melts on your hands.

Hainanese chicken rice at the house of a new friend and her partner, with an old friend and her partner. You bring cucumbers and bok choy, tumbled green and white at the bottom of a tote bag. The chicken falls apart when you touch it; learn again the word tender. The homemade chilli sauce is so spicy that tears form in the corners of your eyes. On the surface of the broth float beads of fragrant oil, silently watching the ceiling above.

Honeygold mango. Peeled over the sink. Somebody long ago taught you how to take the whole skin off with one incision. You eat, with your teeth, with the juice down your arm.

A very good pain au chocolat. First morning in a new city. You haven’t slept. The pastry deposits dreaming flakes in the cuffs of your jacket. Impossible to say how delicious you find it, all that labour and butter and loft; the chocolate batons so rich and dark you can taste their acidity. How the entire move, the packing and lifting and leaving and losing, the long drive north, the goodbye, the one after that, the last one, seems worth it to be within walking distance of a pastry like this. The foreign magpies wait for your crumbs. In their eyes you can see a strange shape. When they move, you realise it’s you.