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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 103: Slade 285
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Cooper 106
Slade now had his fish. He stared at it. How would he cook it?
He wondered whether they could or should simply eat it raw. After all, people did eat raw fish--not him, but some people. He would rather not do this, unless it came to no other alternative.
He had left home with a large box of wooden stick matches. They had been his replacement for cigarettes, and before he had used them all he had started having toothpicks made. He seemed to have gotten away from the habit entirely, and probably still had a few matches left--but there wasn’t much around here that looked like likely fuel for a fire. Even a stack of matches wouldn’t burn long enough or hot enough to cook a fish this size, and then he would be out of matches.
Wait, though--when he first started, before he met Shella, indeed, before Shella was born, he had been lost in a dungeon maze. Then he was using the tools on his belt to kill creatures that attacked him, and he would cook parts of them to feed himself. They weren’t exactly tasty, but they were cooked.
He removed the tool chest from the bottom of his pack frame, and looked through it for the self-lighting blow torch. If he was lucky, there would still be enough gas in it to cook a few more fish. If he was luckier, he had an extra tank of propane in there somewhere, and if he was really lucky, when the Caliph of the West Wind recharged all his batteries at the beginning of his quest to rescue Phasius, he also replenished the gas for the blowtorch. Of course, they were very cautious about using fire on that journey, because the efriit were very much their adversaries there, and indeed they had been opposed to the efriit since then. This, however, did not seem to be a world in which elemental spirits were very involved, and they were going to need fire to prepare food.
He laid the fish on the snow, and hit the button to ignite the torch. Adjusting the flame, he said, “I haven’t done this since before you were born. Let’s hope it’s like falling off a bicycle.”
“Falling off a bicycle?” Shella asked.
“Oh, it’s a joke. There are two expressions that mean almost the same thing--like riding a bicycle, which means that once you’ve learned it you can do it again in the future, and falling off a log, which means that anyone can do it even without trying. The joke is that kids fall off bicycles, so if you mix the two expressions together you get the idea that anyone can fall off a bicycle, that that’s easy to do. Which I guess it probably is. Anyway,” he began running the flame over the surface of the fish, “I have vague memories of how to clean and cook fish from when I lived with Lauren by the lake, but I think it’s easier to scale them after the meat has been cooked a bit, so--I don’t suppose we brought any tableware from our last two worlds?”
She shook her head no.
“Well, I have a pair of long-nose pliers in that chest somewhere, which will be about the best eating utensils we have for the present. Poke around, see if you can find them.”
She looked at him like she had no idea what he meant.
“Oh, the name is pretty descriptive; I think you’ll know them when you see them.”
As to the old stories that have long been here:
