Handwritten Recipes: Excerpts From A Post-Apocalyptic Cookbook

 Have you ever looked for a recipe online, only to find yourself scrolling past a long personal story about the origin and meaning of the recipe before you even get to the ingredients? Handwritten Recipes: Excerpts From A Post-Apocalyptic Cookbook is a story told through those recipe introductions.

Available in the absolutely massive anthology Grandpa's Deep-Space Diner (seriously y'all, it's over 600 pages long), Handwritten Recipes weaves together stories about the main character's family with her own apocalyptic journey to see her grandmother and finally learned how to make all of the recipes that have been passed down over the generations.

The entire idea of the story is about how surviving isn't enough. Sometimes you need to thrive, sometimes you need to treat yourself even though you're struggling to make ends meet. It's about how putting in a little extra work to make a good meal instead of getting something cheap and premade and easy can make a difference in the way you feel.

That theme came easy to me. I come from several generations of people who pride themselves on being cheap, and even when I have money, it's a struggle to splurge on something nice for myself. But it is important and it does make all the difference sometimes. It's the difference between feeding the stomach and feeding the soul, to quote my main character's grandmother.

I don't have a lot of personal stories about family recipes and traditions. The one recipe that does have a story, it's not even the entire recipe:

My uncle Bob made an amazing pot roast. Everyone loved it. So my mom asked for his recipe and she made it, and apparently it was good but it was not Bob's Pot Roast. She asked him what she did wrong, and went over how she made it, and he remembered another ingredient that he forgot to tell her last time.

She tried again. Still not right. Every time she asked him about it, he remembered more ingredients. She was convinced he was doing it on purpose to avoid giving out his recipe, and she isn't sure she ever got the full list of ingredients during his lifetime. She still calls it Bob's Pot Roast, but it's not.

There are no actual recipes in Handwritten Recipes, just stories and advice about surviving and thriving and feeding the soul.

Contains mentions of death, and the end of the world.

Pick up your copy of Grandpa's Deep-Space Diner here.

Darken The Corners Of My Mind

 Darken The Corners Of My Mind, a very short and odd story, is now available at The Arcanist!

I don't want to say much about the story because there's not much to say without spoiling it, so I will tell you about the dream that inspired it.

There was a person with no memories of their own. They had plenty of memories, just… stolen memories. Every time they touched someone, they would take away a memory and it would become their own.

Their life was a mosaic of pieced together glimpses of lives that were not their own. They didn't know who they were or where they were or even know what they were doing at any given time.

They could look at a building, but by the time their brain interpreted what they saw, the information taken in by their eyes was technically a memory from a few milliseconds ago. So instead of the building they were actually looking at, their brain supplied stolen memories of similar buildings.

Even walking down the street, their steps were not their own. They could look at their feet, but they would see sneakers one step, high heels the next. They would only know they were cold because they remembered the chilly wind of a blizzard a decade ago, or the feeling of putting a hand in the refrigerator in another country.

The dream was not dark. In fact, the big conflict involved accidentally stealing the memory of how to make a really good grilled cheese sandwich.

… that's where my story differs. My story is dark. It mentions death, nonconsensual medical tests, and being held against their will in a government facility.