A fluffy, big-eyed mammal on a pair of stilts [https://64.media.tumblr.com/372757a64ecd58d9d2059ff28c38a3ef/e3dcd1530bf16beb-ec/s640x960/d1ce0a02d039c84d75030fbc534880b6c431cad1.pnj]
Picture by Timothy Morris
Koen knew what he would make for dinner. He didn't even need to think about it. The plan had smoldered under his lungs since his first sniff of the Pick kitchen.
No, not a roast bird.
Koen would make stamppot. Real god-damn stamppot.
"Oh," said Laura, "that would be perfect."
He'd made stamppot for her back in Brasília. Well, not only for her. For the Ambassador Li and his wife, but…for Laura too.
She loved watching Koen cook. It was glorious to stand by while he did something she could not do better. There was no frustration while she held herself back from stepping in and fixing things. No guilt when they did the job and it was badly done. No exhaustion after a day spent quietly re-doing everything.
Koen wouldn't say, "Laura, I need you to sauté this sausage." He'd just do it. And Laura could just lean against the counter and watch the muscles on Koen's shoulder move as he made food for her.
"You have all the ingredients?" asked Mark. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out three bottles of beer.
"We already had these." Koen gestured down at the potatoes he was peeling. "And smoked sausage and kale were on my first order. I thought we might need comfort food."
Behind his smile, Mark wondered why Koen hadn't thought to come back to the embassy to get these ingredients. He would have been able to cook real stamppot for Mr. Grumbles. But then if the trip to the Pick residence hadn't been such a disaster, Mark wouldn't have had this idea. This felt better than the cultural performance thing. This idea felt like something life-changing.
"Bottle opener is with the utensils," said Koen.
"How was the Pick residence?" asked Laura.
Koen shook his head, lips tight. "Bad."
"Let's not talk about it yet," said Mark. "Laura, thank you again." It had been an interesting experience to be photographed simultaneously by six dozen birds wearing cameras. Laura had kept them and their elephant-sized partner entertained for forty-five minutes in the spider's soup-kitchen, and she still looked fairly twitchy. Mark would have to release that tension before the woman snapped.
"Thanks for keeping that giant cow-thing occupied while Koen and I got back," he said.
"A cow-thing?" Koen looked up from his peeling. "A mammal?"
"Definitely not," said Laura. "It had armor and these long whiskers or tentacles around its mouth." She made barbel-gestures with one hand while she waved the beer bottle in the other.
"Armor," said Koen to himself. "How many legs? Four? What kind of eyes? Tail protruding past the anus?"
"Koen, how would we know?"
"I'm trying to figure out what it was. What kind of teeth did it have? Were they like bone plates? Extensions of the skull?"
Laura didn't need another job given to her. "Koen, I don't know. I didn't look into its mouth. I just sat there with that weird puppet Quotidian jingling at me."
Koen chopped kale as fine as he could. "That was a decoy made by a spider. How was her soup?"
"Not bad—a spider?" Laura decided she didn't care any more. She took a sip of beer, which was very good. "Did you order this, Koen?"
"No. Alcohol seems to be well taken care of." Koen sliced the bottom off a potato so it would stand still while he chopped it up. "The photographer sounds like some cousin of the armored land-shark we saw on the bus, Laura, remember?"
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She didn't. Another drink.
"In which case," Koen continued, "the photographer was fairly closely related to us, although we still haven't met another tetrapod aside from the Pick." Koen grimaced and shook his head. He slid the potatoes into the pot and covered them with the kale. He added water and turned the heat on high.1
Now to check the sausage slices. They'd been cooking at low heat, so the fat would render out before the meat burned. Now to turn up the burner and form crust. Did he have a spatter guard? No, he'd have to order one. In the mean time, he'd have a pan lid ready to deal with spitting.
Koen turned and took up his own beer. There wasn't much to do when you made stamppot. That was the whole point—busy parents could make it after work and get food into everyone before it got too late. Now to think of more fun things. "I wonder how their armor plates accommodate the body growing under them. And how they breathe air. You said it had all these little flying commensals?"
"Huh?" said Mark.
"Like birds," said Laura, "yes. The way he talked about them, it sounded like he thought they were his soul."
"Fascinating!" said Koen, which Mark did not think was helpful to his goals.
Mark reached out and clinked the neck of his bottle against Laura's. "That photographer was such an asshole, though, wasn't he?"
Laura sighed as if deflating. "He was! Ever second sentence he said was sarcastic. If he thought spending time with me was such a waste, why didn't he leave?"
"And he smelled bad," said Mark. "Like manure."
"Yes! After a while it was all I could think about." Laura held the beer to her nose as if to drive off a stench. "He would say something, and all I could think was 'you stink, you stink!' I don't even know what I told him."
"Hind-gut fermentation," said Koen. "Like elephants. I wonder how his civilization deals with methane overproduction. Uh." He noticed Mark was giving him a look and remembered their own conversation in the spider's restaurant. "I mean, you must have been…disgusted?"
"Constantly," said Laura. "I'll take a shower." She sniffed the sizzling smoked sausages. "But after dinner."
"And…" Koen was still empathizing. "You were angry with Mark and me for being late?"
Laura waved that away. "You didn't know a giant farting cow would come to take Mark's picture. I didn't know. This is that Quotidian's mistake. Mix Sty. I checked the records and she really did say 'you should arrange the photography.' "
She took another swig of beer. "But when she finally returned my call, she told me that she meant that I should arrange the photography, but because humans are such backwards primitives, she knew I wouldn't be able to. That was why mix Sty did me the favor of arranging the photography for us. When I asked her why she didn't tell me, she said it was because I hadn't asked."
"Sounds like some kind of communication breakdown," said Koen.
Laura lowered the bottle and glared at him. "No. Mix Sty arranged all of this to deliberately humiliate me, the embassy, the UN, and the human species."
"Of course," soothed Mark. "We're on your side, Laura. Quotidians are just…" He shuffled through vocabulary. "Bitches" would be offensive to women. "Assholes" had already been used. "Impossible" wasn't strong enough. He took a cue from Koen. "…disgusting," he said. "Disgusting nonhumans."
Koen stiffened. "That's unfair," he said. "It may be Laura just misunderstood—"
Laura was in no mood to be talked over. "What about the Pick? Did you misunderstand them?"
Koen cringed.
Mark decided it was time to launch his idea.
"I'm thinking about dinner tomorrow night," he said.
"Yes," said Koen.
"What?" asked Laura. With all her grievances aired, she was suddenly exhausted. It was as if her strings had been cut.
"I'll cook for you," Koen told Laura. "Just for you." Their eyes met. Slid apart. "And Mark and Severo."
Double, thought Laura, date? Her heart rate increased.
"I think I'll make stew," said Koen. "More comfort food."
That reminded him. He stuck a fork down past the kale and met with no resistance. The potatoes were soft, and he could add butter and warm milk and set to mashing.
Somehow, Koen was no longer angry. He still felt strongly that General Graa was abusing Mr. Grumbles, but the burning, tearing need to fight right now had vanished. Mark was on Koen's side. Laura would be too. Koen would fight, and he would have allies.
1https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFXbniBH1_k, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQrp_tfBQsg