From the Kitchen of Petunia Face

I must be going to that special section of Hell reserved for people who burn books. I bet you this tiny corner of Hades looks a lot like the check out line at Ikea, maybe the 'a' in Hades has an umlaut, or maybe it looks more like the toy aisle at Walmart heavily laden with plastic guns and parental advisory stickers. Except I didn't really burn any books; I cooked them. Specifically, I tore out some pages, brushed them with vegetable oil tipped with soy sauce and then I baked them at 400 degrees for one hour.

And I've always said I don't know how to cook...

When the timer went off I let the pages cool to the touch. Then I crumpled them up tightly in my hand, a wad of warm words, smoothed them out and ironed the pages until they were soft.

With a finely grated reggiano? Delish! And so full of fiber!

This is part of my Secret Service Special Ops Project for Behind Curtain #2 Place of Employment. I needed old book pages but am too broke to go buy actual antique books. So I ripped out a few pages of The Tempest from my hefty volume of Complete Shakespeare, a poem in Spanish by César Vallejo, a page of a short story by Flaubert, all along very much aware of the symbolic implications of destroying my beloved books for the promise of a commute across the bridge every day and a paycheck.

When Bryan got home last night he asked me what I was cooking. The house smelled crispy, a hot wok of consonants, accents a grave and fresh r's trilling in oil. I told him I was cooking a book and his eyes got big and happy. Bryan has this idea that if I would only write a book we would be rich and he would never have to work again. I am pretty sure he got the idea from this one afternoon when we were driving in Pacific Heights and I pointed out Danielle Steele's house, a wide expanse of stucco tiles, palm trees and cabana boys. (Of course Danielle Steele's books are best poked with a fork and then nuked in the microwave for 2 minutes, a guilty feast of shit.) What I did not point out to him that day or any day, every day, in fact, is all of the ho-hum houses, the apartments and rented studios, the basements converted into bedrooms of most writers. The writers who do not rip out the pages of their books to faux antique the pages under the broiler. Maybe that's what Sylvia Plath was doing that day with her head in the oven, retrieving her books, her integrity, her passion.

Sadly I lack Plath's fortitude and am now off to affix my fautiqued baked pages a l'orange to a presentation board. If there was ever a moment, an epiphany when I suddenly knew I was a sell out--this right now? My glue gun heating up next to my now beheaded copy of The Tempest? This. This is it.