M F Drummy

Quiche

Long before Martha Stewart reinvented herself as a Gen Z meme, I decided one late afternoon in March to take a Trailways bus from Entropy west to San Francisco. I had never seen the Pacific Ocean. On the second day we crossed the Mississippi beneath a zombie moon. When one of the frogs sitting next to me cleared his throat, I thought I heard him mumble All my exes are in Texas. From Des Moines to Cheyenne, Deadbeat Dan was sprawled out in the last row of the bus next to the toilet, inhaling thornapple, feeling slightly discocated. Up front, Wren and Nanci checked the global exit polls in the papers. Ever since we set out they’d been sharing that rare intimacy of blamelessness, the cost to their eyelashes measured in Durango silver. We rolled into Salt Lake

in a blizzard where the frogs deboard for good. I spend the night with Wren and Nanci, dreaming of living where cicadas thrum every day. In the morning, the three of us stare directly into the shadows while the bus idles in the motel parking lot. Exhaust, slush, a bureaucracy of tadpoles. That afternoon the bus descends from the pass into Reno but there’s no time to play the slots. Barreling across the Sacramento River, we make San Francisco before nightfall. By the time I reach Ocean Beach the sun has already set. I pass out with a few others

around a bonfire. The next morning: fog and cops and an empty bottle of rum. The Pacific reminds me of the Atlantic: waves, sand, litter. In the Mission District I find a furnished efficiency for fifty bucks a week. With what little money I have left, I purchase butter, leeks, ground nutmeg, fresh asparagus, eggs, half-and-half, a cheap pie crust, and splurge on a wedge of Gruyère and some flowers. Returning to the apartment, I preheat the oven to 350 degrees, welcoming the new season by chopping, grating, whisking, stirring, cooking, blending, baking, and cooling a pie of sorts that,

all these years later, I cannot, for the life of me, remember the name of. As the sun went down that evening, I served myself a warm slice. Feeling like a king, I sat in that tiny kitchen with the bare overhead bulb and the flowers in a vase on the table, considering what the frog had said on the bus. I took a bite and, rolling a cigarette, wondered how things had turned out for Wren and Nanci. And me? I was OK. Martha would have been pleased. Durango could wait.

geese across the lunar domes    we were there

M F Drummy holds a PhD in historical theology from Fordham University. The author of numerous articles, essays, poems, reviews, and a monograph on religion and ecology, his work has appeared in dozens of journals, literary magazines, and anthologies, including Allium, Meetinghouse, Novus, and San Pedro River Review. Later this year, his debut full-length collection of poetry (Perdido) will be forthcoming from MSR Publishing. He can be found at https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/m_f_drummy.