SPICED ALFAJORES

February 13, 2022 Posie Brien

She waits for a long, slow second. It stretches like taffy into another second, then another, until nearly half a minute has elapsed. The silence becomes so meaningful that she can picture it like expanding like a balloon, taking on more air as it swells uncomfortably.

“Okay,” she says stiffly, the word coming out crisp and business-like: the verbal equivalent of rapping sharply on the top of a creme brulee, cracking the sweet candy coating around her heart.

“It’s not…I’m sorry. I tried but I can’t change it,” he stumbles over his words but rather than sounding apologetic, he sounds impatient, like he’s placating a child and wishes to be done with it.

PAN DE CRISTAL

February 6, 2022 Posie Brien

The television is on with the volume muted in the waiting room. She tries to avoid looking at it, concentrating instead on the magazine in her lap — a back issue of the New Yorker open to an article on tracking musk oxen in the Alaskan wilderness — but the persistent neon flashing proves impossible to ignore.

She sighs, and sets the magazine aside, folding one leg up underneath the other and adjusting her weight in the overstuffed chair. The news anchor’s million-watt smile fills the screen, just above the ticker tape of breaking updates scrolling slowly at the bottom of the frame. All anyone is talking about is the storm: up to 19 inches predicted for Pembroke, 24 for downtown Boston, and Sharon forecast to be inundated with almost 30.

CHEWY GINGER COOKIES WITH CARAMELIZED WHITE CHOCOLATE

December 10, 2021 Posie Brien

The first time the phone rings, she doesn’t hear it.

The second time it rings, she picks it up on the third ring and says breathlessly, “What happened?”

His voice comes across the line, deep and happy, and she can picture him smiling as he answers. “It worked! We’re celebrating. If, that is, you’re free.”

She glances out of the window where the snow is falling thick and fast, the flakes so fat and heavy it’s as if they can barely stay aloft. The afternoon is tilting rapidly towards dusk, and the curtain of snow obscuring the city only serves to hasten the departure of daylight.

POTATO CHIP COOKIES

November 30, 2021 Posie Brien

The weak December sun filters through the crimson leaves of the sugar maples overhead. This stretch of Quincy Street is uncharacteristically quiet at the moment—she pictures students all tucked into lecture halls, their backpacks slouched at their feet, the cavernous hallways silent. The foliage is still flaunting its riotous colors, later than usual it seems, and she idly names the trees in her head, a habit instilled in her by hours of forest field trips at summer camp (she can still differentiate between a chipping sparrow and a dark-eyed junco by hearing just a few notes of their trills): American sweetgum, smooth sumac, Kentucky coffeetree.

BUTTERMILK CHEESE BISCUITS

November 19, 2021 Posie Brien

Her nerves feel as tangled up as a knotted shoelace, needing to be gently teased apart and smoothed. Jangled, that’s the word for it. The nerves—electric and snarled—are covering up other things: the persistent pulse of worry and the melancholy blue tinge of sadness and possibly even a fiery, flaming red anger, but she hasn’t dug down that far yet, unable to even touch the top layer.

Eating and adventuring.

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Eating and Adventuring