For Marlene, soup was a broth, cataract cloudy, noodles skimming the surface like a net. It was the type she poured from packets bought at Star Market and mixed with dehydrated chicken bits and imitation carrot. Historic mushrooms wrinkled from their time out of ground set against gluey celery. Granular, no matter how hot the water, birthed from a gentle sanded silt that settled on the bottom. Sometimes, when she was desperate, she’d drink it straight from the paper carton, the cardboard giving way bit by bit until she found it when she was flossing, pulling shreds from between her teeth.
Mostly, she reserved the liquid for late winter nights when the snow closed her door off to the rest of the world and she’d heat the water frantically on the stove because she didn’t own a kettle, hoping to get it hot enough before the power inevitably went out. Those days, she drank it fast and irregularly other days out of cracked teacups that her grandmother left her. It always burnt and left her gasping. Never full.
When she met Ben, it was fall. Coffee shop mix up: she’d picked up his latte and he, her americano, black. A fumbled exchange by the cardboard stirrers, both promising they hadn’t drunk from the others’ even though Marlene had. She held the foam in her mouth for a few moments before swallowing it down her esophagus. A salve of bubbles for future blisters; winter was coming.
I should try a latte sometime, she thought to herself, the immediate calculus of calories and cost held at bay, cordoned off from the present because she couldn’t stop looking at his hands, the perfect half moon nails except for the thumb bitten to the quick, the way he held the cup around the sleeve. How it might hold her arm just below the sleeve.
Left-handed, she decided, until he shifted it into his right.
“Let me buy you one, as an apology,” she said, and his eyes widened with his lips, a smile absorbed in a gentle laugh. “It’s the least I can do because I did actually drink from yours.”
They ended up sitting together before heading to work and, found themselves late and breathless, on each others’ phones. Exchanging books. Music. Time.
“It’s soup season,” he wrote to her once and she was too new to him to disagree, to break the news that soup, for her, was for desperate times when darkness outweighed light and that, as she cradled her phone like something precious, this particular set of days felt less and less like a desperate time and more like the cracking birth of a summer.
“Maybe,” she wrote back.
“Maybe?! Babe, it’s after Halloween,” he replied. “We’ll make soup this weekend.”
She lingered on the taste of babe, on the casual unfurling of we. Given her predilection to soups that took less than a few minutes, soups that had the sound of a microwave ting, of singed skin and imitation egg, she was suspicious. It felt as though she’d cracked the door to invite single-hood back into a space where it didn’t belong. So, then and there, she vowed not to let her definition of soup mess things up for her this time.
“Sounds lovely,” she wrote back. “Consider it a date.”
Because, she hedged, they were still considering this sort of thing.
The weekend arrived, a spray of New England autumn snagged between the end of fall and beginning of winter. She shook off her superstitions and picked up a white wine, an unnamed Chardonnay, because that was what Instagram told her went well with chicken broth, and wrapped herself in a scarf twice her height before heading to his.
The smell outside his door was roasted butternut, the flesh crisped a deep pumpkin in the oven. There was pumpkin and cold cream and nutmeg and coriander. It made her think of lattes, the new fall flavors she’d begun to experiment with, spiced insides. The playlist was all The Smiths and Divine Comedy and Leonard Cohen, carving the night with hymnals of longing, of paths crossed in Waterloo Station. Mesmerizing narratives, love stories in disguise.
But maybe, she chided herself, she was just reading into it like she always did.
She sat at the small kitchen table with the unseasonal frosted wine glass as he wielded a handheld immersion blender and moved, like a dancer, from stovetop to sink. The timing, impeccable, everything rescued before burning or just as the clock counted down to five. There were no brewing bones, just vegetal flesh, and she wondered when she’d admit it: that she had never had soup that wasn’t from a can, a packet, that wasn’t freeze-dried for the survivalists.
That she’d never had a soup that someone else had made from scratch. For her.
It was too late to admit it when he set the bowl in front of her. Cerulean porcelain backlighting the amber, a combination she’d chosen for her childhood bedroom. She thanked him for the performance, and he thanked her for the company even though they hadn’t said anything for fear of breaking the music’s spell, and she dipped the spoon in like she’d seen in movies, tipping silver with gold wax.
She felt the heat before she tasted it, the way it opened a window in her chest. Her rib cage gave a peculiar crack, not a break per se, but more a dissolve of tendon, a letting go, of cartilage melted away to expose bone.
“I need to tell you something,” she said when she was over halfway through, even though she didn’t know how to name it: that feeling of wanting to live inside the warmth of his flat-share, to put that particular playlist in that particular order on repeat, and to eat nothing else for the rest of her life.
He smiled and set down the spoon and their eyes locked over the scarred wood of the third-hand table, his roommate’s from their college dorm.
“It’s really that bad?” he asked.
And she laughed, her stomach cramping with the richness.
“I’ve never had anything like this before,” she said, finally.
“Are you talking about me? Or the soup?” he asked, quirking a sarcastic eyebrow at the soup.
“Both,” she said, and he laughed.
“It’s magic, so I’m not surprised,” he said. And then, more seriously, reached across the table to grab her hand. “A secret ingredient I’ll tell you about sometime if you’re lucky.”
They sat like that, the fumes of fall mixing in their hair and in their clothes, the steam twinning between their hands and Marlene knew she would never, ever be the same and when she went home that night, she tossed all the soup packets she kept in her pantry, the mushroom creams and the chicken noodles and the one-pot ramens away, once and for all.
Salena Casha’s work has appeared in over 100 publications in the last decade. Her most recent work can be found on HAD, Wrong Turn Lit and The Colored Lens. She survives New England winters on good beer and black coffee. Subscribe to her substack at salenacasha.substack.com