“Hey Emily?” I asked, not bothering to break my staring contest with the ceiling. I was sprawled out across the faded brown couch in my living room, legs outstretched onto the coffee table, head rolled back against the cushions, arms flung haphazardly across pillows. It was the exact pose I’d held for the past forty-five minutes.
My older sister, her long blonde/brown hair still faintly smelling of pool chlorine, probably didn’t look up from her handheld conversation to respond. “Yes?”
“What do you think of blueberryless blueberry muffins for breakfast tomorrow?”
“Ooh.” Here, I’d wager, she looked up. “James do you want any?”
My older brother occupied the same position as always, a chair behind the couch. One arm rested on the table next to him, the other held his phone in his lap. His head was eternally focused downward. I could see him just in my periphery. “Umm,” he began. There was the faint click of a cell phone going dark as he looked about the room, choices tumbling around in the clothes dryer between his ears. “Yeah sure.”
“Cool. We’re doing it. I’m excited.” Emily directed the first statement to my brother, the second to the room, and the third down at her phone.
My sister has always been one for short, declarative statements. James’s head resumed its typical posture and I reconsidered a different section of the ceiling. It would be a solid twenty minutes before anyone worked up the strength to go to bed. We shared our exhaustion in summer; there was plenty to go around.
As a general rule of thumb, I accomplish nothing on Saturdays. So when I woke the next morning and glanced at my watch, it wasn’t altogether surprising for it to read double hour digits. I slid out of bed, pausing to throw a t-shirt on before I meandered down the hall to the kitchen. When I overslept, my brother and sister would usually take it upon themselves to craft our favorite breakfast. That or I’d be forced to wake up at the ungodly hour of nine in the morning to assist them. Given the time, I assumed a tasty snack would be waiting for me. And yet, when I turned the corner, the countertop was as messy as the day before. Random cans here and there, plates taken out, forgotten about, and left—the kitchen was unused.
Here I paused. Was it possible my suggestion of blueberryless blueberry muffins hadn’t happened? A mere fiction of an overtired mind? But no, I was certain of their responses. There should be blueberryless blueberry muffins on this counter. I stared, mouth slightly open, as my thoughts grandmother-on-a-crosswalk-ed their way through my head. “Good morning!” called my sister from the dining room, which shared a half wall with the kitchen.
“No blueberryless blueberry muffins?” I ventured.
“You were asleep.”
“You still could have made them.”
“We’re not making you breakfast.”
“You could have woken me up.”
My brother quietly chuckled. I’m not entirely sure at what. He does that sometimes, underscores a particular phrase with a laugh. He picks it out of the rest. Makes it special.
“Will you still eat them if I make them now?” I continued.
“We already ate,” said my sister.
I huffed and turned back towards the kitchen. There was a box of blueberry muffin mix in the cabinet. A stove before me. A fully stocked fridge to my left. Cooking can’t be that hard, I thought.
From the box blueberry muffins are incredibly easy to cook. There are literally five ingredients. The sack of flour/powder/sugar stuff, the canned blueberries, two eggs, three-fourths cup of water, and one-fourth cup of vegetable oil. There are even nicely drawn cartoons showing exactly how to mix the lot together.
Things started well. I took the can of blueberries out of the box and placed it gently on a tower of identical blueberry cans in our pantry. People in my family despise blueberries mixed into their muffins, but we all swear that the box corn muffins are disgusting. So we keep the unused fruit like hoarders, storing for the apocalypse. The lady on the box cartoon had a metal bowl. I found a similar one in our kitchen. She poured the box flour in. I poured the box flour in. Her cardboard hands expertly cracked an egg open. I whacked the white oval onto the bowl and pulled it apart, fragments of eggshell sliding into the flour below with the yoke. I sighed.
In the following twenty minutes of meticulously pulling each piece of shell out of my mixture, I pondered the true meaning of hunger. Was it meant to drive us to find food? Or was it merely a warning of low levels of energy? Or maybe both together? Perhaps some demon cursed our ancestors with a need for food every few hours. Perhaps we’re still paying for that ancient sin—although I doubt there were blueberryless blueberry muffins in Eden. Regardless, my stomach was beginning to rumble and I had only just remembered to preheat the oven. Curse this cardboard woman, I thought, I’ll stick to written instructions for now. They won’t mock me with their cartoonishly perfect baking skills.
I glanced over the instructions. Two eggs. I cracked two more eggs carefully and threw them in. Three-fourths cup of water. I poured it out. One-fourth cup of—I paused. Two eggs. There was one egg already in the mix. So now there were three.
My mind leapt into action. The possibilities: one, give up and throw everything out. Two, cook it anyway and hope things work out, and three, double the recipe. One and two weren’t real options, not after swearing vengeance pacts against my siblings and the cardboard lady. I would have to make these muffins perfectly if it killed me. Besides, who hates having tasty leftover muffins around for lunch?
I returned to my task. Doubling everything is easy for a math wiz like myself. Three-fourths of a cup? One-and-a half cups. One-fourth of a cup? Half a cup. Three eggs? Six eggs. My sister wandered in (presumably to grab lunch for herself) not long after I’d begun applying my calculations to my breakfast. “Why are there so many eggshells?” she asked.
I sighed, disappointed in her inability to draw such a simple conclusion. “I doubled the recipe.”
“To six?”
“Yeah three times two is—oh no.”
She found this quite humorous.
And here I came to yet another choice: fold after one too many badly dealt hands, or double down and press onward. I’m unfortunately quite terrible at poker. I persisted, this time readjusting the math, and double checking, as I had effectively tripled the recipe. More time passed, and my stomach began to audibly complain its lack of contents to the world. I slaved away, mixing more eggs, oil, and water than should ever exist in the same bowl. For some reason it just wasn’t sticking together. I watched each yellowy lump of sugar flop around in the bowl with—then it hit me. The box flour. I haven’t been doubling the box flour. Well it’s just flour and sugar, right?
I stepped back, anxiously tapping my fingers together. I could just add flour and sugar in equal quantities until the ingredients bonded together. This was clearly the solution. At this point, I was about to start drinking the stuff from hunger. Surprisingly, it bonded well and I soon began opening cabinets in frantic search of a muffin pan. There were none to be found. I paced back and forth, sweat beginning to bead on my brow. When had this gone wrong? Questions and doubts raced through my head as my fingers ran through my hair. Think, think, think, think, and there, like a glorious messiah atop the fridge, stood not a muffin pan, but a loaf pan. “Blueberryless blueberry loaf,” I mused aloud.
It certainly sounded better than the shame of defeat. It was creative, in fact. Adaptive in the face of adversity.
The box and demonic cardboard woman advised 15 to 20 minutes of baking. So, armored with two oversized red mittens, I carefully slid the loaf pan into the oven, the batter nearly flush with the pan rim (one might mistake it for a solid brick if it were all the same color) and I set the timer to half an hour.
Half an hour went by slowly—it was past one in the afternoon now, which my stomach was all too eager to remind me. I went to check on my creation and found no change. The batter hadn’t shifted or darkened in any way. I frowned and set the timer again for another half hour.
Time crawled by. I stumbled into the kitchen, starving as they come, and glanced in. No change. Fire itself rebelled against me. In frustration I grabbed the timer, setting it for a full hour and fifty minutes before storming out of the kitchen.
I stumbled back towards the oven what seemed like an eternity later. I would die of starvation, I was certain of it. These blueberryless, formless, mistake-ridden blueberry muffins were my only chance at survival. I wrenched open the oven and stared into the abyss.
The pan was no longer visible—indeed most of the oven was no longer visible—as my creation had spilled over the sides as it grew, swelling to enormous proportions like some sort of distended blueberryless blueberry monster. Kill me, it seemed to scream.
I quietly kneeled next to it.
By some miracle of science the entire thing remained connected, but the overflow had stretched like Silly Putty, reaching towards the floor with its globe-like pseudopods. Patches had been burned unevenly along its surface suggesting smallpox or the bubonic plague.
My sister entered the kitchen.
The smell was more akin to a Pillsbury doughboy burning over an open fire than blueberryless blueberry muffins quietly baking. It was like someone had filled a home with the smell of freshly baked bread, then lit the entire house on fire.
Emily handed me the oven mitts without a word.
While I pulled the abomination out of the oven, bits and pieces flaked off or got caught on the metal tray. I clasped the oblong carbohydrate with one hand holding the very bottom of the pan and the other precariously stretched across the top and leftmost side. Emily cleared a space on the counter. Together, we positioned the mass of congealed failure so that it would not fall.
“Maybe… give up on being a chef.”
I nodded.