Ceremony
PAUL JUHASZ
March 30, 2020
For a soundtrack, I try for something expansive to drown out Anderson Cooper’s reporting and the all-too expert analysis of Drs. Gupta and Fauci, but also something appropriately circumstantial, the right blend of looming menace and uplifting hope. I select Greig’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” and begin.
I use a razor blade for the garlic. I want it so thin it liquesces into the butter in perfect embrace.
I do the onions next; bending my fingers palmward, presenting knuckles only to the blade’s sundering smirk, I blink at the pungency and slice translucent.
The two plum tomatoes I scavenged from the panic-plundered bins at Wal-Mart are not perfect, but they’ll do, rinsed and diced and patient in a stainless steel bowl next to the range.
The basil sits in a cup of water, clinging to illusions of life just a little while longer.
The chicken breast, coated in a mix of panko and parmesan, waits in the cold dark of the refrigerator.
The butter and garlic symbiotic, I unroll the chicken tenderly into the pan. A hiss of protest unzippers the kitchen with hints of sage, a promise of oregano. Five minutes per side, then the taut goldenness removed to the oven while I make the sauce.
A splash of wine to deglaze, morsels of meat loosened from the pan’s plain. More butter, with the onions in tow. The tomatoes join the dance shortly after. When they’ve given up their liquid, I’ll add the cream. The transubstantiation of basil comes last.
I take time with the presentation. The plate undersauce, I lay a bias-cut chicken half horizontally across, its partner angled on edge, parabola-less missile. Additional sauce drizzled over the whole, the rest reserved in a bowl in case of need. Two last leaves of basil, held in reserve, draped across in memoriam.
I pour a glass of Marqués de Cáceres Crianza 2014, breathing the while at the counter corner, and I sit down to a dinner for one.
PAUL JUHASZ has read at dozens of conferences and festivals across the country, including Scissortail and the Woody Guthrie Festival. His work has appeared in bioStories, Red River Review, Voices de la Luna, Dragon Poet Review, Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This Way, and Speak Your Mind, and his comic journal, Fulfillment: Diary of an Amazonian Picker, chronicling his seven-month sentence at Amazon, has been published in abridged form in The Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, then serialized in Voices de la Luna. He currently lives in Oklahoma City.
