Unthinkable

Your sister’s been cooking a lot lately.

The recipes come from her book, of course. You can understand some of the words now. Simple words – ingredients. (You suppose the diagrams scribbled into the margins do help.) Words like basil and marble and salt.

Some words even your sister, with her silver eyes and all-knowing, can’t read. Ink blots consumed the words, dry parchment caving to an irrevocable hunger. It spreads, even now. Your sister copies what is left into the notes on her phone.

You ask her what she’s cooking for.

She says she doesn’t know. But she wants to.

You shouldn’t have expected anything different.

So you leave her to her concoctions on the kitchen counter. The strange smell follows you out the front door; it is cloying, but not sweet; neither putrid nor pleasant – you don’t know what you think of it. Or rather, you can’t think it at all. Whenever you try to form an opinion about your sister’s strange recipe, static erases all thoughts.

Another exchange, you decide. It must have been taken when you were young, when your grandmother was not even an embryo.

You do not mind.

Trade has always been your family’s forte.