WIP: Last Week's Ghost

An Instructive Listing of the Street Foods of Tabat, being Pamphlet #5 of the first series of “A Visitor’s Guide to Tabat,” Spinner Press, author unknown.

The visitor to Tabat will find themselves faced with a multitude of new things, and the food of the city is no exception. Carts and food stalls in particular supply many of the daily food needs of the populace.

No matter where you go in the city, you will find the bakery carts. Most belong to the Figgis Bakery, but you will also see some from smaller and independent bakeries. They sell a multitude of breadstuffs, including several pastries unique to the city: two and twos, large flatbreads which are half one color, half another; hyacinth cookies with their distinctive purple icing; and jelly cups.

Close to the docks, particularly around the Fish Market, vendors sell all varieties of sea food, cooked on the spot and fresh from the boats that have just brought it in. Many of these use the seaweed spices Tabat is famous for: ironbite with its metallic peppery taste; summer salt; and the mix of dried fish and seaweed that forms the basis of chal. Look for kerik, the sweet purple nodules of seaweed that are harvested in late summer, for a particularly exotic treat.

Sweets are usually flavored with honey from bees or Honey-mothers, or a touch of Fairy honey for those with more expensive tastes. Of late, though, the Southern Isles have been sending sugar to Tabat, expensive and rare, and a dusting of such atop a pastry or cake is considered to render it the height of culinary sophistication.

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#sfwapro

Today I have been writing! Costa Rica is fabulous, and we’re enjoying Jaco. Walked out for breakfast this morning and later on to the super mercado for groceries. My high school Spanish is, luckily, coming back in leaps and bounds.

I’ve been working not on a story set here, though, but one in Vegas. Here’s the beginning of what is looking like it will hit novelette length at least, “Carpe Glitter.”

Carpe glitter, my grandmother always said. Seize the glitter.

And that was what I remembered best about her: the glitter. A dazzle of rhinestone, a waft of Patou Joy, lipstick like a red banner across her mouth. Underneath all that, a worry little old lay with silver hair and vampire-pale skin.

Not that she was one, of course. But grandmother hung with everyone during her days in the Vegas crowd. Celebrities, presidents, they all came to her show at the Sparkle Dome, watched her strut her stuff in a black top hat and fishnet stockings, conjuring flames and doves (never card tricks, which she hated), making ghosts speak to loved ones in the audience and when she stepped off the stage, she left in a scintillating dazzle, like a fairy queen stepping off her throne.

All that shine. And at home?

She hoarded.

I mopped sweat off my forehead with the hem of my t-shirt and attacked another pile of magazines. No cat pee – I’d been spared that in these back rooms, closed off for at least a couple of decades. Grandmother had bought the house when she was at the height of her first fortune, just burst onto the stage magician scene, a woman from Brooklyn who’d trained herself in sleight of hand and studied under the most famous female stage of her time.

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