Bring to a boil, then simmer
BY FEATURED WRITER: Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Christina McPhee, Datura Telepathy, oil, ink, and dye on canvas, 50 x 42 x 2.5 inches, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
Bring to a boil, then simmer
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya / MAY 2021 / ISSUE 8
Ginger and garlic and hot pepper and fennel butter-sputter in the bottom of a soup pot while you wrap your bloody finger with a damp paper towel. Your fingertip caught on the grater again. Distracted by the wound, you burned the butter. The smell reminded you of pancakes, but you chucked the brown gloop in the sink and began again. Butter, ginger, garlic, hot pepper, fennel—back in the pot. Turmeric and coriander seeds, too.
A grated finger is nothing.
—
The soup is meant to be a reminder. You want to remind her—with spices and matchsticked scallions and cracked seeds and noodles and thick, hot broth—you are all her body needs. She once said it herself. She once said she could swim in a lake of your soup, and you felt your insides butter-sputter. You told her she could walk through your door—any day, any time—and no matter what, there would be soup, and she could have a taste. You didn’t yet know the ways in which she would test this promise. So far, you have not broken it. She can do anything to you, and there will always be soup.
Worrying the slice on your finger, you think that if she notices it, she’ll tell you to be more careful, sure. But she’ll also lap at the blood like a vampire puppy, and it’ll make you laugh. She’ll lap up the soup, suck at the spoon, dip the bowl back toward her throat. For a moment, she won’t be hungry, and you will relax. She will marvel at the care you take of her, and you will both have seconds.
She keeps telling you to be more careful when you hurt yourself, and you laugh every time. You care plenty. Too much, maybe. But just because you care doesn’t mean you’re cautious. In the kitchen, you’re unhurried but messy. Careful but not in control. In the kitchen, you lose yourself, and you’re also the most you.
Besides, who is she to talk about care? She hurts herself in far worse ways.
Maybe tomorrow, you will make something else. Chicken thighs baked with mustard and lemon. An asparagus and goat cheese tart with crackling-crisp pastry. Or a fish grilled whole, charred and bony, using your fingers to pinch off its softest flesh—its cheek, just below the eyeball—and then let it melt on your tongue.
But it won’t be long before you return to soup. Her hunger always comes back. She vanishes, she lies, she acts like nothing has changed. She blurs at the edges like she’s evaporating, and you’ve convinced yourself the only way to pull her back is to drown her with soup.
There are only so many soups you can make. She has joked about the sex muscles widening your arms, sliding her hand over them and squeezing. You don’t correct her by saying they’re actually soup muscles. Stirring, stirring, always stirring, always curved over a soup pot, your curls wrestled into a bun because the steam makes them frizz, sweat gathering behind your ears.
Always stirring, always chopping, always slicing, always grating. You can’t say you don’t see the violence of it. Of course there are accidents. Of course you’ve caught skin on blade, fingertip on angry grater.
—
A refrain:
“What’s for dinner?” she asks.
“Soup,” you answer.
“What’s for dinner?”
“Soup.”
“What’s for dinner?”
“Soup.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“Soup.”
Before her, you would have thought there are only so many times someone can have soup for dinner before getting sick of it, but she never does. The routine doesn’t seem to bore her at all. She’s genuinely excited every time.
Before her, you never would have associated soup with sex, but there’s no denying it now: the way she eats soup makes you wet. So loud! So messy! You could watch her slurp soup endlessly. You told her this, and it made her laugh. She’s told you you’re sexy when you’re cooking, and you’ve told her you miss her when she isn’t here. When she isn’t here to watch you stir. She likes when you miss her. She says she misses you, too. She asks for another bowl of soup and you happily ladle it.
—
Your friends are worried about how much soup you’re making. You’re losing hours of your life to stirring. They wonder how you’re not sick of soup, sick of stirring, sick of losing pieces of yourself.
“You’re not married, you don’t have kids,” they say, as if these are the only reasons people stay. You don’t tell them they’re hurting you, sloughing off bits of you like the grater.
You don’t tell them you’ve started calling each other wife despite not being married. It’s just an inside joke, really. And the word tastes good. I’m making soup for my wife, you say to your soup pot one night, and it feels like the most normal fucking thing.
“I don’t want to talk about soup anymore,” you tell your friends.
—
Ginger and garlic and pepper and fennel butter-sputter in the bottom of a soup pot, but soon they will become indistinguishable from one another and from the many other spices, everything curried together, the hard bits softened by heat and liquid. Sputtering gives way to simmering gives way to stillness. She will come home to a swarm of scents, and she will be over the moon.
Here she is, kissing your neck. You’re still craned over the stove, and her lips catch sweat. Her hand is warm on your shoulder. She doesn’t notice the cut on your hand yet. More sweat slides into the soup, part of you becoming broth.
Her words slur slightly as she asks: “What’s for dinner?”
The soup gurgles its response below your pressed-together heads, and you don’t have to say it, but you do anyway. Soup.
She loves habit, and she loves you. Crane your neck deeper and see those loves aren’t so separate. They’ve curried together. She loves habit she loves you. You’re just another one of her hungers.
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Miami. She is currently a fiction editor at TriQuarterly and a writer for Autostraddle. Her short stories appear or are forthcoming in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, The Journal, and Joyland. She attended the 2020 Tin House Summer Workshop for short fiction and is an upcoming fellow for Lambda Literary's Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.
Christina McPhee’s images move from within a matrix of abstraction, shadowing figures and contingent effects. Across drawing, painting, video, networked and photo-based processes, she engages potential forms of life, in various systems and territories, and in real and imagined ecologies. Her new paintings in the series Trickster Utopia (2020-2021) entangle sensations of human, plant and animal spirits in a mashup of landscape, anime, and collage, together with traces of text and performance. Born in Los Angeles, McPhee grew up on the Great Plains in Nebraska. Museum collections of her work across media are with the Whitney Museum of American Art, International Center for Photography, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Sheldon Art Museum, Great Plains Art Museum, Colorado Springs Art Museum at Colorado College; and internationally, with Thresholds New Media Collection in Scotland. Solo exhibitions include the American University Museum, Washington, D.C. and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden, for her project Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries. She has participated in many international group exhibitions, notably with documenta 12. Drawings based on the poetry of Sor Juana de la Cruz, plus a new video/audio collaboration with Ashon Crawley, will be in the group exhibition Otherwise/Revival, at Bridge Projects, Los Angeles (April-July 2021). Her drawings have most recently appeared in print with Radical Philosophy (fall 2019) alongside an essay by philosopher Rei Terada. McPhee lives and works in central coast California.