on the menu

At Ten Tables I order a brown butter walnut cake with some goat’s milk ice cream that tastes, for all the world, like blood. My eyes fly open as it hits me, the sharp iron tang: that feeling I’m ingesting something wrong and perverse, Edward Cullen out for Valentine’s Day dinner. I clap one panicky hand over my mouth.

“What?” Tom asks, eyeing me with suspicion. Already tonight he has gamely eaten beef cheeks, turnip soup, and two types of uncooked salmon. I worry that vampire ice cream might push him right over the culinary edge.

“Well…” I swallow with some effort and open my mouth to tell him, but before I can get the words out I come down with an impossible case of the giggles, noisy and inappropriate in this temple of serious eating, all wine pairings and foie gras and pomegranate reductions. The laughs bubble up inside of me, unstoppable: red and liquid, full of life.