Peter. May 24th, 5:25 PM. Boston

Beth pursed her lips and gave me a long, hard stare. I looked back, innocent as the world. I hadn’t realized calling her, ‘sweetheart,’ would cause such offense. After a few seconds, she shook her head. “What’re you doing by the sink?” she asked.

“Oh! I’m washing up,” I said. I pushed up the handle on the faucet and let my hooves soak under the running water for a few seconds, before I finagled my way into the hand soap. “I was thinking I’d try and cook supper, so...figured I ought to clean myself before I make the attempt.”

“We— Well, okay?” Beth didn’t sound so sure of her approval. “What’re you making?”

“Nothing too complicated,” I said, before quietly adding, “I hope.” I pushed off the sink and shimmied my way over to the counter. “Just some mixed pasta, and a little pesto sauce. Trying to keep it simple.”

“That...doesn’t actually sound so bad.”

“Right? I thought it’d be nice to give you guys something normal. God knows we need it.” I forced out a laugh—my body seemed incapable of genuine laughter, no matter how many jokes I told myself. “Especially after today.”

“Yeah.” Beth was quiet for awhile. Even though she made no sound, and I didn’t look at her, I could still tell she was there. I could feel her presence. “You need any help?” she said after a minute of watching me fuss around with a bottle of olive oil and a packet of pine nuts.

“No, no. I’ll be fine. Where’s Jake?”

“He’s with the truck, unhitching the trailer we picked up earlier today.” A trailer? Nice.

“He’s working?” I asked, rhetorically, “That’s good. Look after him when I can’t. Please? He’s—” I paused, having finally gotten the nuts into a bowl, “He’s everything to me.”

“Yeah...okay,” Beth said, before she turned away and started off. Her hooves stopped clicking against the concrete floor for a moment. “And hey, Peter?”

“Yeah?”

“If you ever change your mind...about the talking thing. Let me know, okay? I was thinking, while I was out today, y’know? We’re the only things we’ve got, now. It’s just us, and maybe God.”

Yeah. Maybe God. While it took some effort not to roll my eyes, it was beyond me to sneer out loud at anybody’s beliefs. Whatever keeps a person going, keeps a person going. “Don’t worry,” I assured her, “I will.” It was enough to convince Beth, and she left me to my business.

Now that I was peacefully alone in the kitchen, I looked back to the task ahead of me: cooking without hands. At first, it seemed like it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossibly so. But the longer I sat and thought about it, the easier it seemed. I could still grasp objects in my mouth, and a bit clumsily with my hooves, but I could still grasp. I would have to take it slower than usual—not that I was ever particularly fast.

I folded my forelegs up against the kitchen counter and surveyed my ingredients: a family-size box of spaghetti, a package of ‘fresh’ basil, a plastic container filled with pine nuts, sealed, grated parmesan cheese, olive oil, and garlic. Pesto was a simple enough sauce to make—and I already knew the proportions for a good blend.

I turned my attention to the blender I’d picked up during my supply run. At the time, it seemed like a great idea to use a blender and save myself from a night in front of a mortar and pestle. Now, however, I came to the slow realization that my hooves were just too big to effectively work the buttons.

After that, I would have to fill a pot with water, strain it out without losing the noodles, and—before I had even finished thinking of the problems I might face, they’d already been solved. By the time I finished one thought, I’d also finished a dozen others.

“No sweat,” I mumbled, dragging myself along the counter, getting all my prepackaged ingredients in one big bundle between my forelegs. Time wasn’t exactly of the essence; I’d make the sauce first, then cook the pasta, and mix it together at the end. No need to try and do it all at once. I’d more than likely fuck up and overcook the pasta or splatter the sauce everywhere in my rush. Without much more deliberation, I got to work.

I had to use my teeth to get into the childproofed seals on all the containers. They had clearly been made with the intention of being opened by a person with decently long fingernails, or with a knife, or with a pair of scissors—none of which I had at current. It was a sloppy job, but the plastic actually felt kind of nice to bite through, if only to test the frightening sharpness of my teeth.

Once I got the packages open, I pulled the blender over and set about removing the little safety tags that would prevent its operation; again, using my teeth. I absolutely decimated the twisty tie that kept the power cord all bundled up, and I nervously fiddled it into the outlet with my hooves. The risk of biting into it if I used my mouth was far too real.

With the blender plugged in, I set to work adding the ingredients. Half a cup of oil as the base, let the basil float on top, weigh them down with the pine nuts, and dump in the peeled cloves of garlic. I added the cheese last. Just as much as I thought would work out.

The grip I had to take to be able to reach the buttons on the blender with the curvature of my hoof was awkward to say the least: I had to wrap my leg around the back of it and brace it against my other so that I could keep it from getting pushed around on its shitty rubber feet whenever I tried to push the buttons. Much to my surprise, the thing did not wrench itself from my grasp when I revved the motor. In fact, it was more stable than I could’ve kept it if I were still a human. I hadn’t realized it first, by the hoof I’d been using to stabilize the blender had glommed on, its whole shape changing to grasp it better. I barely even felt the kick of the blender’s torque whenever I pulsed it!

It didn’t take long to turn the ingredients I’d put into the blender into a somewhat fine, very slightly chunky, green paste. I couldn’t taste test it, unfortunately; I would have to settled with eyesight alone. And, I mean, it looked alright, and that’s all I had to go on.

With the sauce taken care of for now, I had to suss out how to fill the pot with water. Well, that wasn’t the hard part—it was getting this giant pot of warm water out of the sink that was the hard part! The weight itself didn’t actually seem to bother me. I was already quite unstable, having to balance with my chest pressed against the side of the counter and squeezing the pot between my hooves like some sort of toy crane.

Perhaps what impressed me most during that ordeal was the strength I could bring to bear. This huge pot, easily the size of my chest, hardly weighed a pound between my horrible, chitinous hooves! I could barely believe it when I’d finally set it down on the heating coil. In fact, I wasn’t even sore from the effort. Not even a little creak from the plates all over my body.

With the water ready for heating, my next step was to actually turn up the heat. Should be simple, right? It turns out, child-proofing is actually pretty good at keeping more than just children out of things. The dials for the heating coils were what could be expected out of any respectable stove; they wouldn’t turn unless you pushed them inward. Normally, this wouldn’t be much of an issue, but the problem was that the dials had a very low profile. Normally, there’d be a sort of spine to pinch your fingers around, but these were bizarrely flat—with little divots I’d assume were meant to be for fingers, a bit like the holes in a bowling ball. I managed to leverage my hooves’ sticky properties to press the dial down and use friction to turn it.

But once I got the heat on, I set it all the way, then left it. This was my break time: watching a pot boil. It would take a minute or so for all that water to heat up, but I couldn’t trust myself to multitask. A couple days ago, I would’ve already started toasting bread and cutting vegetables for a salad, but I also had fingers a couple days ago.

Eventually the water hit a rolling boil, and that was my cue to dump the spaghetti in. The box wasn’t much an issue; I just bit the top off of it. With the noodles free, I haphazardly dumped them into the pot. One or two strands escaped, but I wasn’t terribly concerned with accuracy at this point.

What I did need to be concerned about, was stirring the spaghetti. I had a nice, long wooden spoon, sure, but no hands; It would be quite hard to see what I was doing. I initially tried holding the spoon in my mouth and stirring like that—but I quickly found that a nontrivial amount of my own hair also got into the water, and that wouldn’t do. I might contaminate the food, and that’s no good! I settled for clasping it between my hooves and hoping for the best. I didn’t get the best, but I certainly didn’t get the worst.

Next, I had to strain the boiling water from the pot. Now that, I knew, would be a challenge. I set out the strainer in the kitchen sink, which was, thankfully, quite close to the stove, and stalked back to the pot. I set the dial in the ‘off’ position and propped myself up against the counter. I did my crane impression again, but very, very slowly. I couldn’t squeeze the pot between my hooves as I did before. I tried to at first, but I could very quickly feel the sting of intense heat racing up my legs—one of the few things I could feel.

There was no clean way to dump the water. In the end, I just set the pot on the side of the sink and tipped it over, directly onto the poor, defenseless strainer. I lost a few more strands of spaghetti, but they were a necessary sacrifice as far as I was concerned.

Once I had finally gotten that harrowing leg taken care of, I set the pot back on the stove, and brought the cooked noodles back to it. I dropped them in, then poured in the sauce, stirred it all around a little, and put a lid over the pot to help retain heat. I didn’t bother to make it particularly secure; air pressure would keep it closed all on its own as the pot cooled off.

“Now...bread,” I grunted to myself. I had to make garlic bread. It wouldn’t be complete without a starchy side for such a starchy entree! I picked up the loaf of French bread I’d grabbed while on my ingredient run and set it out on the counter; it seemed clean enough, and I certainly wasn’t walking all over it, so I made an assumption. That said, getting the bread set out was the easy part—now I had to cut it!

I found a knife block the previous owners of my new home had left behind and, fortunately, they had exactly what I was looking for: a bread knife. A long, serrated edge, with a flat, rounded tip, perfectly dull. It was, essentially, a miniature saw, intended for cutting into something that would be keen to crumble under any other treatment.

This was how I discovered the dexterity of my tongue; I wrapped it around the handle of the knife and held it all tight between my jaws. After that, it was a simple matter of pinning the bread with the back of my hooves and head bobbing it to pieces.

I had to do the same with the cheese, and the garlic I was able to use a spoon for.

I took it all and sandwiched it between the halves of bread—cut with a flimsy hinge left on one side, so the halves wouldn’t drift away as I nursed them onto a metal baking sheet and set them aside while the oven warmed up. It was a small miracle that this fancy, electric oven used real buttons for the controls on its panel. If I had to rely on a bunch of sensors detecting my more than likely nonexistent bioelectric current, I’d have been shit out of luck.

In the meantime, I was free to work on the salad. A big bowl of carrots, lettuce, mushrooms, and croutons, with a sane, light dressing drizzled over the top. Simple. It was actually the easiest part of my preparations, given the things I’d learned preparing everything else.

When the oven finished preheating, I giddily stuffed the bread in, careful not to bonk my chin against the racks. With the bread on its way to crunchy perfection, I took my time tossing the salad, if only to give myself something to do while I waited.

Cooking is meditation.

Meditation that was immediately disturbed by a presence milling about in the doorway behind me.

“Hey Pete,” Jake muttered. He shrank back a little when I turned to face him, and I let an awkward silence form between us, out of nothing more than spite. The little asshole had known me for over twenty years! Why now would he suddenly be such a puss—

“‘Ey bro,” I muttered back, and watched him jump at the sound of my voice. “W’sup?”

“What’s cooking?”

“Spaghetti.”

“Oh.”

“Hey, can you grab Beth and go find us some guns?”

“Oh, uh, yeah. Yeah, sure.” And then he was gone.

My ears flicked about as I “felt” their souls skitter around the house for a bit, then trundle out the front door. I waited for them to hop in their truck, and listened to the big, obnoxious turbodiesel whine and hiss into the distance, and when I could no longer feel their presence, I flipped my shit.

Author's Note

Taking a months-long break from writing a chapter never ends well.

At least it's done—now we can move on to more talking and being confused!