FIRST COURSE
paris-style tobacco gnocchi
wrapped in pan-seared dollar bills, glazed with jalapeño jam
SECOND COURSE
four test tubes
bone-filtered vodka, old-fashioned rose soda, pitcher plant nectar, tincture of blowfish venom
erlenmeyer flask provided for mixing
INTERLUDE
adrenaline syringe (5 mL)
THIRD COURSE
quarter swan
cooked by injection of jellied charcoal, followed by ignition
port wine jelly, feathers tempura, fig-stuffed giblets
FOURTH COURSE
vanilla ice cream
served on a bed of brain coral pâté
topped with pickled starfruit, lobster honey
The presiding chef has a history of pushing boundaries.
“This limousine is endlessly long. Were you to reach the front, you would be at the end of space and beginning of time.”
“But there is a driver?”
Before setting foot in the temple, she unfastened her shadow from her boots, then folded it neatly at the base of the stairs. This was not just a matter of reverence, but also one of self-preservation; the lanterns that flanked the entrance had teeth, and the flames within them had tongues.
“Me and the other girls from the power plant, we come here after work all the time. Their special milkshakes are to die for. I haven't found a single flavor that I didn't like."
Together, they drank an indigo wine fermented from Neptune's clouds, and wondered if they'd ever travel so far together.
"I could never do it, my love."
Six men sat down to play Russian roulette, and by the end of their game, seven of them were alive.
"I've seen this happen before," the new player spoke.
Kissing was invented in the city of Thusk, a seaport with thousands of citizens, yet only one dentist. Her services were scarcely needed, for the civic biologists had rendered most of her profession obsolete.
"This telescope was built to accommodate several different modes of operation,” the observatory’s director explained. "For instance, right now, it's set to hermetic mode. That means that whenever you focus its lens on a particular star, the image of that star exists just as far backwards within your mind as the star itself is from your eyes."
When he is seen in visions, Nexorpan, the god of small agonies, has no face: what appears to be a sea urchin sits atop his neck as a surrogate head. Its numerous spines have shredded the torso of his three-piece suit, exposing the raw patches of violet skin beneath. Every morning, his handmaidens bathe him, dress him, and tend to his wounds, yet all of their work is swiftly undone.
He noticed the crystal ball on the oracle's table. “I take it that this is what shows us the future?”
"Nah." Her face flashed briefly into view beneath her hood as she lit another cigarette. "You didn't do your homework, did you? Looking in from outside, the crystal ball shows you the past. Looking out from inside, it shows you the future. Here, let me show you how it works.”
The gargoyles of the Red City cannot fly; the wings of fossilized coral that they carry on their backs serve as an ever-present reminder that they were built by humanity to surveil in stillness. Even so, they shamble through the streets of the city at night on legs that groan in defiance of their stone composition.
"My mother taught me that all of the punctuation marks that you miss while typing build up in your fingertips over time." She held up her hands, revealing that the ends of her digits were covered in black splotches. "So, I haven't used any since I was twelve. I’m chock full of them now, periods, commas, parentheses, you name it.”
While it’s not uncommon for factory errors to result in fortune cookies with blank messages, when Martin split his open, he found that it contained an atypical form of blankness. Along the left-hand side of his fortune, a blinking cursor could be seen, still awaiting user input.
At times she was known as Ararat, at others, Meru. When seen from Greece, she was known as Olympus, and in the time of Gilgamesh, she was known as Nimush. Her peak reached such unimaginable altitude that it could be seen from all the nations of the world, even those that were a hemisphere’s arc away. This summit was said to be the exact point where heaven and earth intersected, and as such, only the holiest among the living were allowed to climb her thousand faces.
FIRST COURSE
paris-style tobacco gnocchi
wrapped in pan-seared dollar bills, glazed with jalapeño jam
“The greatest literature is that which needs neither be written nor spoken. Tell me, Henry, have you ever explored the genre of ‘silence fiction?’”
“Hmm. No, I can't say that I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Are you sure? Some people refer to it as sly-fi.”
When she brought him back to her loft, it was clear that, one way or another, she’d been planning on having company. There was a bottle of Chardonnay plugged into the wall, emitting a faint, amber glow.
By the end of the twentieth century, it seemed to many as though there was nothing that an acrobat could do with their body which had never been done before.
Claudia changed all that: during one particularly spirited performance, she leapt from her trapeze into the pupils of her audiences' eyes, down into the depths of their visual cortices, and landed to loud, sincere applause.
"This is the library's killswitch," she explained. "In an emergency, we can use it to generate a hyperglyphic field that turns the Roman alphabet inside-out within a quarter-mile radius.”
“Christ. What would we ever need to use something like that for?"
INGREDIENTS
1 Noh mask
1.5 gallons rooibos tea
7 specimens dried coral
1 pair caribou antlers
FIRST COURSE
paris-style tobacco gnocchi
wrapped in pan-seared dollar bills, glazed with jalapeño jam
The leather-bound cookbook contains three-hundred seventy-seven recipes, including instructions for preparing alligator skin, thickening petroleum into flan, and slow-cooking ingots of iron until they’re tender enough to swallow. Before all of this, however, the text begins with a set of initiatory instructions, required for the chef to “survive their own work.” These instructions are as follows:
appetizers
twice-baked eel skins with gruyere - $12
braised trilobite on soft seaweed crisps - $16
nudibranch tempura with lobster honey - $18
During the early 1990s, single-use magic wands began appearing in dollar stores throughout America. For the most part, these were simply hollow, black tubes of polystyrene filled with a light dusting of powdered aether. Each contained just enough mystical potency to help with a single household task, whether that be washing the dishes, grilling burgers, or cleaning stains from the carpet. No incantations or prior initiation were required; after a few seconds of vigorous shaking, the wand’s plastic tip would pop off, allowing the pressurized magic to escape as a jet of violet smoke.
During the first phase of manufacturing, jellybeans are perfectly transparent. In this preliminary state, they look like misplaced contact lenses, or raindrops that failed to burst on impact. These beans have no flavor of their own, yet contain the potential for all flavors; when bitten, there is only that familiar texture of a tender shell giving way, followed by that of semi-molten starch oozing apart.
STARTERS
$7.99 BEER-BATTERED INSECT MEDLEY - A mixture of hornets, fireflies, and grasshoppers, deep-fried in our signature pilsner batter, then glazed with charcoal salsa. Don’t forget to spit out the stingers.
$4.99 WEST TEXAS POPCORN - Cooked over an open flame the old-fashioned way, then tossed in thistle butter, dusted with rock salt, and finished with a drizzle of cactus blood.
$9.99 HUMMINGBIRD SKEWERS - Grilled whole on shish kebabs with peach slices, brussel sprouts, and artichoke hearts. Painted with a glaze of local petroleum, served burning.
Jellied piano keys. raspberry jam, sesame seed. $9. - black keys only - $3.
Deep-fried dragonflies. tempura batter, quicksilver crema, mirror honey. $11.
Tree frog poppers. whole poison dart frogs, tempura batter, unstable habanero isotopes. $11.
Long pork sliders. pickled radish, black onion, hemlock vinaigrette. $10.
“You’re not seeing my shadow because I ate mine in the womb.”
He didn’t exactly believe her, but then again, she really didn’t have one. “Is that normal?”
“It’s not very common, but it happens.” She ran an index finger around the rim of her wine glass. “Have you ever tried umbratarian cuisine, my dear?”
He let her pick the appetizers on their second date, and in turn, she ordered the peach pit fondue.
“I love this place. They only use peaches with bottomless pits here,” she explained. “Birds that peck into them in the wild often lose their beaks, if not their entire heads. It takes a chef with real skill to craft them into something that humans can safely swallow.”
“Wait! Doesn’t that hurt your hands? At all?”
She pays her date no mind, however, and continues unscrewing the light bulb from its socket in the lamp hanging over their table. It eventually comes loose, but never loses power; the glow continues as she balances it between her long fingers. “I learned this trick back in college,” is her only explanation. She then taps it against the edge of her plate like a hardboiled egg, forming a loose webwork of cracks along its shell.
My apprentices have arrived with thirteen jars of pineapple jelly, and one by one, they pour them into the cauldron. Tonight, I’m teaching them a recipe that I learned while temporarily dead, during which time I worked in the underworld’s highly competitive seafood scene. The golden ooze begins to bubble as saltwater and black rum are added, combining into a thick, honeyed lava. I dip my sword into the concoction and stir it gently, watching wounds form and heal along the surface of the mixture.
“The clawfoot bathtub,” this book begins, “is a distant cousin of the crockpot and cauldron. Although its natural habitat is typically found outside the kitchen, it demonstrates a particular susceptibility to culinary magic due to its shape and composition. Being quadrupedal and wrought from relatively flexible materials, bringing one to life is often one of the most basic lessons taught to apprentice deep chefs.”
The discerning chef of the deep kitchen carries a revolver on their person at all times. There’s no telling what might emerge from the Black Oven if its door has been left open for too long, but for those who thrive in such a high-stakes environment, the recipes for gourmet bullets are just as familiar as formulas for cocktails are to bartenders. Hundreds of variants have been developed, and several of the most coveted are detailed herein.
Most who throw rainbow filets onto a skillet for the first time are surprised to discover how much they sizzle. They are not lean, and store numerous tender hues in their belly in addition to those outwardly displayed. It is not advisable to gaze directly into the pan while cooking is ongoing, as many of these colors are too volatile for the human eye to process, and may cause damage to the optical nerve.