A Recipe for Possum Soup

Back Home

I first came upon this recipe while browsing r/MealtimeVideos. I had just moved to Tennessee, didn’t have a single friend in this lonesome world. And I had just made some delicious risotto. So I needed a good video to enjoy it with. As a child my father would never let us watch TV during meals. Dinner was family time. So we sat in silence. Uncomfortable, screaming silence. The scraping of plates. The gnashing of teeth. Dad was a loud chewier. He always had a bone to pick at. Gnawed it raw, broke it open and sucked the marrow dry.

“How was your day?” Mom asked, breaking the tension. As valiant an effort as there has ever been.

I shrug.

“Answer your mother.” Dad said, dryly through bites of a moist chicken breast. We had made it together. And he was savoring every bite. He had thrown a bag of chicken in the sink and told me to cook it, while he reached for another beer. When I said I didn’t know how he said, “You know how to eat don’t you? Figure it out.”

And then he showed me. Through, fuck yous and motherfucks. But still he showed me all the same. Wash the chicken. Flour. Egg. Breadcrumbs. Is the oil hot enough? Toss some flour in, see how it sizzles? Every piece goes into the fire. Repeat the process. There’s a rhythm to it. Pale white flesh goes yellow to golden brown. But it’s still pink on the inside. Finish in the oven. Did you not preheat the oven? Stupid motherfucker. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Stop crying, you did it! You’re finished, now go do your homework.

“I don’t know,” I pushed a pea up a mountain of mash potatoes. My own Sisiphilian task. “Okay, I guess.”

“You don’t know? How can you not know?” Dad’s spittle was thick with succulent chicken juice as he chewed the bone clean. He licked his fingers one by one.

The sink was full of Natty Ice cans now, the day's fallen soldiers. Each can, a lesson in its own right. Something I hadn’t done right. A word I had spoken out of turn. The pot had been left on the burner too long and now the water was boiling over. It was too late to talk about my day. So I stayed silent. And that was the wrong thing to say.

“LOOK AT ME WHEN I’M TALKING TO YOU!”

I didn’t even see the hit coming. Too preoccupied with the river of gravy washing my poor pea downhill. And suddenly plates were being thrown, tables overturned, and the shouting and crying carried us long into the night.

Well, I am a man now. I have no need for family time. And I need to have a good video to watch with my meals. So I searched Youtube for Dark Souls challenge runs and Yugioh Lore videos. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t played Yugioh since I was 12. Anything but the silence of my own company. I had already exhausted my usual subscriptions for new content. When you reach this level of desperation any brain rot content will do just fine. Just not the brain rot I was finding.

Thank you to this video’s sponsor, some shitty VPN and gotcha mobile games. This used to be the modern day commons. A resource where people came to share ideas and creations for free. Art for art’s sake. But the plough of capitalism had tilled the soil bare and salted the earth in its wake. Tired of ads? Give us money. This isn’t a resource, it’s a product. The Sitcom Era had come for the internet. The old world was dead, and the new world was strangled in its crib.

I had come to Tennessee for some community. After dad died I wanted to be closer to my family. But that hadn’t worked out. Now I sat alone in my dingy apartment eating risotto for one. Anna wasn’t texting me back. I ate in bed with my laptop out and my feet kicking in the air like a school girl gossiping with her friends. But I had no friends. It was just me and my cat. She poked her nose in my bowl and I hissed at her.

“Meow,” she said, offended by my crude racial remark.

“Meow,” I apologized, putting a little spoonful of rice directly on the mattress in front of her.

She sniffed it curiously, and turned her ass to me. “Eow!”

We communicated like that, in a tongue neither of us really spoke. But there was an understanding.

“Meow.” I don’t want that, she said, I want your food.

“Mao.” No, it's mine, I said. Besides, you already ate.

“Meeeeoow.” But father, I am hungry. I am starving.

“Yeow.” No, you’re not, fat ass.

I pushed her off the bed. She stared up at me, Hurt. Betrayed. Unloved.

I tapped the mattress a few times. The signal for her to come. She laid down next to my overheating laptop. Dust clogged its vents, a great suffocating machine huffing and wheezing with each breath. She curled up there in its warmth, purring as I scratched her behind the ear with one hand and returned to my browsing with the other. Nothing was scratching the itch for me. I scrolled endlessly through AI generated content mills to anti-feminist rants about children’s shows. Trying to find some solution to the problem. My algorithm was degenerating with every refresh of the page. An infinite loop spiraling ever downwards.

My risotto was cold. No missed calls. No new texts. And still I hadn’t found anything worth watching.

Why do I need a video, I thought.

My ancestors didn’t have Youtube when they sat around the campfire, hunched in leathers and furs, with some chunk of seasonless meat and a mammoth tusk of wheat-soda to wash it down. Was I just ADHD brained? Some tablet baby in need of constant stimulation just to satisfy my basic needs? No, even they had a shaman telling stories about the great old one, who built the mountains and painted the sky.

I threw my risotto out. It plopped into the trash with a sicking sludge.

Something stirred within the trashcan. A large black slug emerged from somewhere deep in my garbage. Its eye stocks twitched and scanned the landscape as it slithered to the surface. A zombie pushing its fist through the earth. There must have been some radiation in that cold risotto. My trash was fertile with new life.

I looked around at my filthy kitchen with the same intensity. The empty beer cans that lined my furniture as if placed as decorations. The rotting vegetables at the bottom of my fridge, abandon hope ye who enter here. Plants I bought for atmosphere, dead in darkness. More wheat for the locust. The yogurt that had once been milk, its own civilization with its developing culture. No Live, Laugh, Love in this Home Sweet Home. More Rest in Peace, or Die, Motherfucker, Die. My apartment was alive and thriving in its own echo system. An incubation chamber for the next plague. Flies buzzed around the drain, entire generations of maggots born writhing in the canyons of dirty dishes. Roaches nesting down in the caves of my walls, scavenging the remnants of my meals. Mushroom colonies rose into empires from the waters of my toilet. Sustenance. Blessed sustenance.

I was the god of shit and rot. A black thumbed gardener, everything I touch withers and dies.

And now my creamy risotto was feeding a slug. A miracle from the heavens. I had been looking forward to it all day, and now Beelzebub here was swimming in its rich essence.

I threw some salt in the can and took the bag to the dump.

The moon shone down on Tennessee. I had thought there would be more stars here in the country, away from the city lights. But the sky was black and void. Just more so. The bag leaked brown mystery liquid all the way down to the dumpster. The cheap bag tearing beneath its own weight. Cheeto wrappers and banana peels tumbled out. I looked like a sad juggling clown stumbling through the parking lot. I poured out my trash into the dumpster, Santa Claus spilling out his presents for the good little rats and flies. The brothy mess rained down reverberating through the hollow walls.

“Hsssss” Something deep in the dark grumbled.

Two pitch black, beady eyes stared out at me. A jaw stretched wide and devouring. Prickly drooling teeth hissed from the back of the dumpster. Grey mangey fur bristled and flustered. We stood there staring at each other. Unflinching. Unwavering. Then came the chirping. A tiny pink, malformed creature crawled from under the great beast. Its eyes still shut tight. Then another. And another. They rolled around in the sticky brown garbage soup, marinating in it. What fur they had was soaked in the septic ooze of their Trashalla.

I stepped back and walked toward my apartment. But I didn’t go inside. I stared at the dumpster and lit a cigarette.

Sometime later, the mother possum crawled from the dump, just as the sky was breaking into streaks of pink and orange. Row upon row of babies clang to her back with their wormlike talons. They slept warm and secure and full. Dreaming. The possum scurried along the fence’s edge. Corn cob clenched in her teeth. And she looked back at me. Before vanishing into the breaking dawn. I felt so moved in that moment, that I went inside and made this dish.

So here it is, my recipe for possum soup:

Every recipe must start and end with someone doing the dishes. Anywhere you go you’ll find a great big mess. Someone has got to do the dishes. Someone has got to take out the trash. You cannot cook on a dirty stovetop in a grease stained pan with maggots in the drain. So you have got to roll up your sleeves, put on your rubber gloves, and do the dishes. Mom ain’t going to do it for you. You have to do the dishes. So how do we start? Well, you throw out the churled milk, the stinky cheese, the browning meat. You get your shit together, put it in a bag, and leave it by the curb. You might imagine the garbage man coming to pick it up and take your shit somewhere very far away. Out of sight, out of mind. One of the unsung heroes of modern society. Thanklessly, taking other people's shit and tossing it into the jaws of the great steel beast of consumption. Compressing it into little bricks or burning it all to ash.

But as a substitute, you might instead imagine your own garbage can. Imagine a family of raccoons taking asylum in the safety of its silicone walls. A scruffy Papa with the scars from past battles with the local dogs. Mama raccoon carrying a babe in her mouth. Another, clings to her back. Every night is a struggle, but tonight they are safe. Tonight they grow fat and happy on the moldy crust and rancid meat your shit leaves behind. Tomorrow maybe some kid with a BB gun puts out Papa’s eye. Or maybe Mama can’t dodge the cars quite like she used to. But tonight they feast, and they are content. There are songs and rejoicing. They gorge on your leftover meatloaf and bathe in your spilled milk. The trash kittens need to eat too. And for a time, the Hunger is sated.

A good cook must pay respect to the Hunger. Without hunger why would we cook? You have felt it, too. Inside yourself. When you take out the trash, seeking that little smoke break before the hostess calls her open count and you have to run back to the line. Another order for another fat ass hungry for endless wings and bottomless mimosas. Always consuming and never giving anything back. You haven’t even eaten today. Maybe you swiped some burnt mozzarella sticks. Or some cold fries you couldn't sell. If you’re really lucky someone sent back a steak that you split with the dishwasher. But the Hunger gnaws at you. Anna still won’t answer the phone.

So you sit there, smoking your cigarette and taking out the trash. The vagrants emerge from the shadows to pillage the dumpster for untold soils of war. Sometimes it's the raccoons. Sometimes it's the homeless. But always they come, crawling on their bellies. Hungry for any morsel they can chew. But whatever you imagine, the trash will still be out there, somewhere. Trash is a part of life that we must all live with, but only you can decide how to live with it. So you got to keep taking it out and taking it out and taking it out, until you get down to the very root of the rot, the source of the decay. Sweep and mop and scrub and scour. Until everything glistens and gleams. Life is trash, but trash is life. The crumbs of your sandwich nourish the mice. They grow fruitful and multiply. A bouquet of rodents. Decay just means that something lived here once, and maybe something else lives here now. No one thinks of the rats and roaches when they write their elaborate stories for a recipe that is sure to impress dates and show up that obnoxious relative with their “famous” Mac N Cheese that you know is just Velveeta. We all know.

But who cares? We are alive, and tonight we feed. We feed ourselves and others. There is no food that is not improved by good company. So tip your waiter and give your complements to the chef. But above all, do the dishes. And that is how you make possum soup.

Add salt to taste and serve.