Sourdough

by Robin Sloan

human-shaped generators of CAD and code. I tried to emulate them, but something hitched inside me. I couldn’t get my turbine spinning.

In my apartment on Cabrillo Street, I existed mostly in a state of catatonic recovery, brain flaccid, cells gasping.

I know those feels.

Mazg!

First my stomach unclenched, and then my brain. I let loose a long sigh that transformed into a rippling burp, which made me laugh out loud, alone, in my kitchen.

I also know these feels.

“Secret spicy,” he whispered. The soup was so hot it burned the frustration out of me, and I went to bed feeling like a fresh plate, scalded and scraped clean.

And these.

My company-issued laptop was hulking and loud, the roaring fan necessary to cool the superfast GPU within. At my desk, I hooked it into a pair of monitors, a keyboard, a tablet with stylus. No mouse. I’d learned the tablet trick from one of the patient programmers at Crowley, who recommended it as a ward against repetitive stress injury.

Does that work?! I wanna try!

The gray slime inside looked distinctly not alive. It looked like an enemy of aliveness.

Ha! So perfect.

You would expect a vegetarian, perhaps, to eat vegetables; you would be disappointed.

The house was large and deeply lived-in, all the shelves and surfaces stacked with books and boxes, framed pictures, old greeting cards set up like tent cities. If there was a spectrum of spaces defined at one end by my barren apartment, this marked the other extreme. Every single surface told a story. A long one. With digressions.

There was a malevolence to it. It was not on my side.

Garrett operated at a level of abstraction from food that made me look like Ina Garten.

reticent

“You keep using this word. It does not mean what you think it means.”

The CD’s seven songs were slow and meandering and seemed to fade one into the other. Some were sung by groups of women, others by groups of men, and one was a mixed chorus. The style was all the same: sad, so very sad, but matter-of-factly so. These songs did not blubber. They calmly asserted that life was tragic, but at least there was wine in it.

“This is Lembas. It’s much better. Have you tried Slurry?”

pedaled my new route: cutting south from Cabrillo Street to ride through Golden Gate Park on my way to the Wiggle, which would take me to Market Street and, at its terminus, the Ferry Building, locked tight.

I was interested in fin de siècle pottery, rejected applicants to the Oulipo, siege weaponry of the Gironde.