© 2023 janegr

Reading Food

Pen had made a chocolate cake for Pollux. It was the size of a pillbox hat, moist and dense. I carried it home wanting like a bear to stop and eat it with my paws.  From The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich
We have days like this: On the way home from the supermarket, towing forty pounds of groceries in a hand cart, I step dead center into a big piece of dog shit. Thirty minutes later, Shauna drops a jar of mustard, which explodes on the kitchen floor and sends hundreds of mustard glass fragments shooting across the tiles.  From Four Seasons in Rome, by Anthony Doerr
Nicola used to carry flash cards with her, and she’d greet her son at pickup with a snack that she said in the name of another language. Pomme. Banane.  From Weather by Jenny Offill
In college, Paul would buy a fiesta-size bag of Doritos on Sunday after Mass and lie stomach down on his bed with his textbooks and notebooks propped up against hi pillow and do all his work for the week ahead. He didn’t stand up for hours at a time. A cup of coffee and a bag of Doritos was all he needed. Our dorm beds made an L in the room. Every Sunday I could look at his body for as long as I wanted. From Five Tuesdays in Winter, Hotel Seattle, by Lily King
I’ve been holed up in my studio for almost a week now, talking to no one, working in stretches of up to fourteen hours, subsisting on take-out Thai and orange juice. From The Art Forger, by B. A. Shapiro
I didn’t know how badly off we were until my mother stole a dozen heavy silver spoons from our landlady, who was kind, or at least harbored no grudge against us, and whom my mother counted as a friend. Adelaide gave no explanation for the spoons when I discovered them in her pocket. Days later they were gone and Karl and I owned thick overcoats. Also our shelf was loaded with green bananas. For several weeks we drank quarts of buttermilk and ate buttered toast with thick jam.  From The Beet Queen, by Louise Erdrich
Margaret suddenly swapped the positions of the ashtray and figs and wineglass. She altered the aperture (click). She moved a wineglass, the packet of cigarettes (click) (click) (click) (click).  From Still Life by Sarah Winman
He went on drinking gin and lime-juice, quietly laughing over being so upset when the children has first mentioned the dark-faired man who took them on his knee. Gin and lime juice was a Gimlet, he told the barmaid. She smiled at him. He was celebrating, her said, a day that was to come. It was ridiculous, he told her, that a woman casually met on a train should have creating havoc, that now, at the end of it all, he should week by week butter bread for Marmite and tomato sandwiches. From The Collected Short Stories, Access to the Children, by William Trevor
I don’t know how many times people have asked me what death is like, sometimes when they were only an hour or two from finding out for themselves. Even when I was a very young man, people as old as I am now would ask me, hold on to my hands and look into my eyes with their old milky eyes, as if they knew I knew and they were going to make me tell them, We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I’d walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a fried egg sandwich and listen to the radio, when I got one, in the drakes often as not.  From Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
“You don’t eat,” Lucy was always saying.
But he did eat. He made an effort, anyway.
“One pea at a time,” Lucy once said to a friend.
“I do not!” Edgar had shouted. “I eat a lot of peas at the same time.”
From Edgar and Lucy by Victor Lodato
30 Jan This entry was written by janegr, posted on January 30, 2023 at 3:24 pm, filed under Photography. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.