x-drabble
RADIOACTIVE wild boars roaming European mountains after eating mushrooms contaminated by Chernobyl
… this is going to be some X-person’s mutant origin story.
Once there was an up-and-coming chef who’d staged at one of Redzepi’s places and had started their own restaurant with a focus on nose-to-tail single-source boar and a five-course foraged food tasting menu mostly featuring ferns, flowers, mushrooms, and a lichen that only grows on the wood of ash trees that face north and have been peed on by baby deer no older than three months.
But their single source for humanely-slaughtered-by-bow-and-arrows-shot-by-vegan-virgins boar was the Bohemian Forest and, in the process of perfecting the recipes, they ate enough to have ingested a thousand times more than the survivable dose of Cesium-137 and died young, earning mournful eulogies in both Saveur and Bon Appetit, countless food blogs, and a mention at the Beard Awards. They trended on Instagram for a week.
At least that’s what the public thinks happened.
In actuality, our chef fakes their death because they’d noticed that in addition to their tattoos starting to glow in the dark, they were starting to change in other ways. Instead of just being a master of the six tastes (one of their tattoos is, in fact, “oleogustus” transliterated into Adyghe), they were noticing five more - six, if they’d only had kombucha that day. All of this was to the good, but some of the other changes were clearly less so and could not be hidden by plaid shirts and a knit cap. The tail, for instance, which could not be hidden in skinny jeans no matter what. It was time to disappear.
Getting to Xavier’s school was entirely by accident. They’d rented a converted barn on a farm turned ashram-and-pottery-school in the Hudson Valley and had hoped to hide out there, earning their keep making kale salads and grain bowls for the canteen, but accidentally wound up on I-684 instead of the Sprain Brook after a construction detour on the Hutch. When they took the next exit off and asked for directions, they were instead directed to Salem Center because everyone in Westchester knows what that’s a euphemism for when asked by someone wearing dark sunglasses and covering their face with a Harry Potter scarf in July.
They weren’t terribly interested in fighting to save a world that feared and hated them, to be honest. They weren’t over the first scathing reviews in The Guardian and if that philistine who couldn’t see why only using water made by melting ice smoked by Laplanders who’d had lutefisk for breakfast made all the difference in the poached plaice, then he deserved whatever fate befell him. But, after some grudgingly accomplished soul-searching, they agreed that helping on a more locally sustainable level would not be a waste of their time.
So if you find yourself in trouble and then suddenly out of it, especially in a place that sells PBR and microbrews made from beard yeast, if you hear a faint sound of music from a band that you’ve probably never heard of, then know that you have been saved by the mutant known as Hipster.
Footnotes:
Rene Redzepi and foraging $600/plate dinners
the “six tastes”
Hudson Valley as Williamsburg North
(originally posted to tumblr)
Also posted at DW.
… this is going to be some X-person’s mutant origin story.
Once there was an up-and-coming chef who’d staged at one of Redzepi’s places and had started their own restaurant with a focus on nose-to-tail single-source boar and a five-course foraged food tasting menu mostly featuring ferns, flowers, mushrooms, and a lichen that only grows on the wood of ash trees that face north and have been peed on by baby deer no older than three months.
But their single source for humanely-slaughtered-by-bow-and-arrows-shot-by-vegan-virgins boar was the Bohemian Forest and, in the process of perfecting the recipes, they ate enough to have ingested a thousand times more than the survivable dose of Cesium-137 and died young, earning mournful eulogies in both Saveur and Bon Appetit, countless food blogs, and a mention at the Beard Awards. They trended on Instagram for a week.
At least that’s what the public thinks happened.
In actuality, our chef fakes their death because they’d noticed that in addition to their tattoos starting to glow in the dark, they were starting to change in other ways. Instead of just being a master of the six tastes (one of their tattoos is, in fact, “oleogustus” transliterated into Adyghe), they were noticing five more - six, if they’d only had kombucha that day. All of this was to the good, but some of the other changes were clearly less so and could not be hidden by plaid shirts and a knit cap. The tail, for instance, which could not be hidden in skinny jeans no matter what. It was time to disappear.
Getting to Xavier’s school was entirely by accident. They’d rented a converted barn on a farm turned ashram-and-pottery-school in the Hudson Valley and had hoped to hide out there, earning their keep making kale salads and grain bowls for the canteen, but accidentally wound up on I-684 instead of the Sprain Brook after a construction detour on the Hutch. When they took the next exit off and asked for directions, they were instead directed to Salem Center because everyone in Westchester knows what that’s a euphemism for when asked by someone wearing dark sunglasses and covering their face with a Harry Potter scarf in July.
They weren’t terribly interested in fighting to save a world that feared and hated them, to be honest. They weren’t over the first scathing reviews in The Guardian and if that philistine who couldn’t see why only using water made by melting ice smoked by Laplanders who’d had lutefisk for breakfast made all the difference in the poached plaice, then he deserved whatever fate befell him. But, after some grudgingly accomplished soul-searching, they agreed that helping on a more locally sustainable level would not be a waste of their time.
So if you find yourself in trouble and then suddenly out of it, especially in a place that sells PBR and microbrews made from beard yeast, if you hear a faint sound of music from a band that you’ve probably never heard of, then know that you have been saved by the mutant known as Hipster.
Footnotes:
Rene Redzepi and foraging $600/plate dinners
the “six tastes”
Hudson Valley as Williamsburg North
(originally posted to tumblr)
Also posted at DW.