by Neil Clark
When I cook for you, your face lights up.
You ask me what my secret is, and because I love to tell you my secrets, I tell you. I tell you I hike north every night while you’re asleep. I rent a rickety plane and befriend a jaded pilot and bribe him with whisky to fly me head-on into where the magnetosphere meets the supersonic solar winds. I match him shot-for-shot. I listen to his old anecdotes and, when he buries his head on the bar and cries and slurs that he’s not young anymore, I put an arm around him. Then we take to the sky for auld lang syne. Mid-loop-the-loop, we say our goodbyes and I thank him for a memorable night. I jump out the cockpit window. He careers into the side of a cliff. But don’t despair, I tell you. He dies instantly. Happy, too. Doing the only thing he ever loved. And while I’m parachuting back home through the polar light with the flames from the cliff warming my back, I collect the aurora in a dusty Glenmorangie bottle. And that’s what seasons the food.
You tell me the food is delicious, but is it worth missing out on sleep to do a thing like that? Not to mention the jet-lag. And the stress. And the life of that poor man.
I tell you yes, it is worth it. I tell you the sky up north is like a favorite film I can watch over and over, because there’s always something beautiful and sad and different to grab me, even when I think I know every line and every unspoken gesture off by heart.
I tell you your face is like that, too.
Then we make love, and our magnetic breath pants heavy mint greens and hot scarlet reds back up into the sky for me to bottle again by night.
Neil Clark is a writer from Edinburgh, Scotland. His work is published in X-R-A-Y, Okay Donkey, Philosophical Idiot and other great places. Find him on Twitter @NeilRClark or at neilclarkwrites.wordpress.com.