Hot Soap

Dane cooks pasta and it makes him feel...things. An experiment in flash fiction.

Dane poured the pasta into a large robin’s egg blue ceramic bowl from the hot pan, the yellow of the carbonara and its pink pops of pancetta—he couldn’t find guanciale at his market—as vibrant as a fresh Crayola 24 pack. Little bits of sauce slid down to join the spaghetti—he couldn’t find bucatini at his market—as flecks of black pepper appeared through the steam.

It was an indecent facsimile of what he’d eaten in Rome, but Dane had to try.

The pan, now empty, still burned bits of eggy sauce that refused to slide away. The smell of wet scrambled eggs was a poor man’s version of what he had smelled elsewhere. The flavor would be reminiscent, he knew, but Dane had once been the type of person who wouldn’t settle for less-than. His twenties were marked by untraditional milestones. A year teaching in Vietnam. A backpacking trip across the French Alps. Pearl diving off one of Tahiti’s smaller islands. The pasta all over Italy—pesto in Genoa and tortellini in Bologna among the top contenders. He had gained six pounds and had never been happier, losing them quickly while training for back to back marathons along America’s West Coast.

Now, he could barely see past the lace curtains of a window that he knew all too well needed cleaning. On the other side, the yard lay abandoned. The swing set hadn’t creaked in ages.

The pan sizzled.

The pasta beckoned like an abandoned lover, desperate but abandoned for a reason. It didn’t make him—and he hated thinking this way—it didn’t make him feel anything. Truth be told, he hadn’t felt much in a while. He hadn’t tasted new foods, seen exotic places, met new people.

Life was tricky like that, doing its best to numb you into complacency. It started skipping ingredients that left you wondering, missing the notes that created harmony. There were fewer chances to feel the thrill of fear, of the unknown.

No amount of cracked peppercorns could fix it.

Life was bland.

Dane took the still-simmering pan to the sink and did what he wasn’t supposed to do. He poured dish soap all over it. Suddenly the viscous orange liquid sizzled and bubbled, the odd smell of cooked, hot soap filling the kitchen where moments ago stale Pecorino Romano—that he found in his market—and salty pasta water perfumed the air.

Dane felt alive. Dane was taking a risk.

He picked up the abused-lookin sponge, a sort of mint green color, and touched it to the hot soap, pressing it in, absorbing it, feeling the crispy bits of pancetta that had not escaped to the bowl, seeing it all mingle with the steamy hot white bubbles of the soap as it exchanged with the pan, energy flowing both ways. It vibrated with caloric transition.

With the sponge, he pushed harder, feeling the heat from the pan travel through it, nearly burning his fingers.

That same heat.

The burning sun in the Moroccan desert.

The scalding beignets in New Orleans, fresh from the fryer.

The stewing public baths of Budapest in the winter where his body boiled as ice crystals formed on his hair.

It was all heat he had once known.

Risks he had once taken.

Experiences he had filled a memory with to nurse him through the times when risks would have had higher stakes or larger consequences. When ramifications of his thrills would be to the detriment of others.

He pressed harder into the pan, breathing in the faux-citrus odor of sautéed orange peel and lemon juice that the soap emanated.

Dane closed his eyes.

He dropped the pan and turned on the water, cooling the heat. Washing away the soap. Returning everything to the stasis that he had always tried to avoid, where no risks and no danger appeared.

Bland, once more.

He dried his hands and picked up the blue bowl of pasta not yet cooled on the formica counter. From the drawer next to the stove, he picked a clean fork and dipped it into the mix, still warm. He walked to the living room.

The evening news played on the television.

“Here you go. Dinner’s served. Carbonara like they make in Rome,” he said.

“What’s that now?” A white-haired woman swimming in a sweatshirt with a Niagara Falls logo hunched over a tray, an empty mug of tea and a pillbox with seven compartments marked with days of the week sat atop it. A box of tissues had fallen over onto the floor. Dane retrieved it and set it on the coffee table in front of her.

“It’s spaghetti, Gran. Spaghetti.”

“Oh, thank you Bobby, thanks so much. It smells wonderful.

He didn’t bother reminding her that he was Dane, and that his father, Robert, had passed away six years ago, and that his mother had been in the car with him that night. The thrill of drinking and driving was one Dane never chased down. His father’s tendencies toward risk, however, suggested his own were hereditary, tempered only by his mother’s genetics.

None of that mattered anymore.

“You’re welcome, Gran. Enjoy it,” he said.

“I will, Bob—I mean Dane. Dane. I’m so sorry sweetie,” she said, placing a hand on her temple, as if remembering made her head throb. The way she looked at him knowingly in those moments provided a taste of something sweet, sweeter than any thrill he had chased.

It’s all that sustained him.

Dane slipped back into the kitchen where the faintest scent of citrus, like the bitter oranges fallen from trees on a backstreet in Lisbon, slowly faded away.