Hottakes
Fiction │Text and Audio
I didn’t set out to write this story, it just sort of fell out of me, which is how I like my stories. I figure that if I’m surprised by them, you will be, too. As an experiment, I’ve also recording an audio version. Let me know if you like that, and want it to be a regular thing.
It had been a slow morning when the man arrived. I’d sold nothing and was sat behind my little table at the entrance to the park. Surrounded by my goods, I tried to project the relaxed confidence of someone not silently begging strangers to validate him.
He approached slowly, wearing blue overalls with a lightning-bolt-shaped grease stain across his chest.
“What are these?”
I pointed at my homemade sign: Hottakes: fresh and delicious.
“Hotcakes?”
“Takes.”
“Like... opinions?”
“Exactly.”
He picked one up and began reading.
I watched him carefully, while trying not to watch him carefully. For it is humiliating to observe someone consume something you have made; and yet it is also thrilling. Every facial twitch is a micro review.
He smiled. “That’s not bad.” He read another paragraph and laughed. “Funny. Nice ending. The aftertaste is sweet.”
“Thanks,” I said. “They’re my own recipe.”
“How much?”
“Just six dollars a month.”
“A month?”
“Yeah, it’s a subscription. That way you’ll always get the latest hottakes whenever I bake them.”
“How often do you bake them?”
I shrugged. “Depends.”
“On what?”
“How busy I am. Life. The muse.”
He looked down at the hottake in his hand. “Can’t I just buy this one?”
I shook my head. “I used to sell them like that.”
“And?”
“Well, no one bought them.”
“Do they buy them like this?”
I shrugged again. “It’s early days, innit. I could do you a discounted first month?”
“How discounted?”
“About a hundred percent?”
He picked up another hottake and read it slowly. He put it down. “This one’s stale.”
“What?”
“The part about how having a child helps you relive your own childhood, I’ve read something like it before.”
“Really? I thought I came up with that.”
“Sorry, man.”
He handed the hottake back. I took it reluctantly. He was right, it was cold. This is the hardest part of my business. When you finish baking something, it is so hot, crisp and fresh. Feels so important. But once you put it in the world it goes quickly stale. You discover other people have already made the same thing, but better. Hustled it harder.
“Can you bake me a fresh one?”
My eyes narrowed. “Like… right now? Do you know how much work it is to make one of these?”
His back straightened. “I work hard too.”
“I know.”
“I’m a plumber,” he said, as if settling a score. “Yesterday, a pipe exploded and I got crap in my eye. Literal crap, not a metaphor, Horatio Hottake.”
“Well, I once spent forty minutes on a semicolon,” I offered.
“That’s not the same thing.”
“I suppose, but punctuation is kind of writing’s plumbing, isn’t it?”
His eyes circled slowly. “No. Just no.”
“Fair enough. And yeah, I’d feel guilty about how great this job is were it not for the poverty, which is less noble than they promised.”
“And yet you won’t even make me one. Even if I pay.”
“You’ll pay?”
“Eeeeh,” he said. “Maybe? If it’s really delicious. Really tasty and hot. Bursting with humour and insight.”
“Fine,” I sighed, and got out my laptop. I stared down at it and cracked my knuckles. Scratched my chin. Stared up at the sky. Stood up and stretched my back. Sat back down. Thought about death, and how it was racing towards me. Thought about life, and how slowly it was passing. I pondered the lifespan of geese. Gazed respectfully at a tree far older than me. A dog chased a stick. I thought how I wanted to be the dog. No, the stick. No, the dog. A toddler fell over. Got up. Fell over again. I thought about things in the news. The world’s myriad discontents. Naked mole rats.
I ate a handful of M&Ms. I stared at the little printed letters. Suddenly, for reasons I could not explain, I became furious. Not at politics or injustice or any of the world’s actual problems.
No, at the M&Ms.
Because any idiot could see there was only one thing in that bag: Ms.
They were wrongly named. Nobody calls a family of four “Human&Humans.” They’re just Humans.
This was a wrong I could not let go. And so I cracked my knuckles again. I was muttering to myself, I noticed. The plumber was staring at me, unsure if he was still being served, or witnessing a minor breakdown.
My fingers started moving, almost of their own volition. It’s often like that. One minute you’re sitting in a chair, staring at a glowing rectangle, trying to force words into sentences that shine, then, without warning, you’re forcing nothing. The words come. The work disappears. You are no longer mortal. You no longer have persistent lower back pain. There is only the puzzle. The task. The thoughts, and the flow.
For thirty minutes there, I had what should be an illegal amount of fun.
I printed the take out and handed it to him.
“It’s called ‘Ms,’” I said.
He read it and laughed six times. “Preach,” he said, folding it and slipping into the large pocket on the front of his overalls, where I was sure he usually kept important things like wrenches, metre rulers, and tiny bottles of schnapps.
“So,” I said. “How about that subscription?”
He looked down. “I’ll think about it.”
He turned and walked away.
He didn’t pay.
They never do.
Later, feeling the usual mixture of disappointment for the outcome of writing but gratitude for the process itself, I noticed a piece of paper tucked underneath a stack of my hottakes.
It was an ad. CONFESSIONS OF A PLUMBER: Stories from the pipes, the people, and the things nobody sees.
Huh, so he had his own little table too, it just wasn’t next to a park.
I got out my phone and sampled one of his hottakes.
It wasn’t the freshest — some of the metaphors were a bit lumpy, the tone a touch vitriolic — but it was fine enough. I could tell he’d had a lot of fun making them.
I even thought, very briefly, of subscribing.
I did not subscribe.
Instead, I left a comment that pretended to be about his writing, but was secretly only advertising my own.
On the way home, I refreshed my Substack dashboard.
No new subscribers.
I searched the M&Ms thing on Google. Turned out a lot of people had already had the same idea.
Some had expressed it better.
Some worse.
Nobody seemed to care either way.
And honestly, neither did I.
I knew I’d get up the next day and bake new hottakes because I wanted time to melt like that again. To produce something more articulate than I am. I wanted to give the world my rapt attention, even if it gave none back.
As did he.