Welcome to the fourth issue of Strange Pulp, an irregular journal of weird fiction. Today I am proud to present a story by Robert Zander Norman, an extremely talented playwright and author who writes some of the most beautiful prose I’ve ever read. If you enjoy it, I strongly recommend that you:

1. Share it with a friend.

2. Like or comment on this post to let Robert know how much you enjoyed his work.

3. Support his art by purchasing one of his zines. They are cheap, lovingly made, and make wonderful presents. I particularly endorse “So You Have a Vanilla Bean” “Notes to Girls,” which includes a short love note written by me.

Read Issue 4 in ePub / PDF

Content Warning For Issue 4

Today, I’m preparing a family recipe, one my grandmother gave to me. Where she got it from, whether it was the wind or God or her own ancestors I’m not actually sure.

They’re called Cinnamon Buns, or, occasionally, just Buns when, in context, you’d be able to understand that what we’re talking about are these buns. They are the superlative cinnamon bun, so there’s no need to dress them up and call them anything different.

There’s not a secret ingredient, but there is a secret attitude, which is that you need to strive for perfection. I hope that makes sense. Nothing perfect is complicated.

This will be done in stages. You’re familiar with the format of a cooking program. I’ll show you how to do a step and then I’ll spin around showing you the fruits of that labor from twelve hours in the future. It’s called a swap. I know that it looks or feels like magic, but it’s hard work. Magic is also involved, but that’s a separate concept.

To start: a stick and a half of butter, cold and cubed, a couple of eggs and two more yolks, seven hundred and fifty grams flour, a good amount of commercial yeast, the kind that works dry, salt, the good kind that reminds you of the ocean, and this much milk.

You mix all of that together, with your hands or a whisk or an egg beater, or if you have a machine you can use one. Anything works. A stand mixer is easiest, but you’ll never get strong, you’ll never get the muscles of a baker, of a grandmother, if you don’t just roll up your sleeves and stick a hand in.

I do stick my hands in, both of them.

Saying muscles is funny, because I do literally mean your biceps and your triceps and your, the shoulders, deltoids? And your fingers, from the tips to the knuckles, but also I mean your mind, and your feelings, and your sense of things, your intuition. My grandmother had all of that strength.

I start to knead.

You mix all of that together, the ingredients, until they’re combined into a dough and you keep going until it’s the right consistency.

What is that? The right consistency?

I’ve been asked before, and I understand the question, because it’s what I asked her, my grandmother, and the answer is that it shouldn’t stick to your hands or the bowl any more, or it does, but not in the same way, not in a truly sticky way. It should look like you’d want to eat it. But actually, the real answer is that it’s done when it’s done, and not to worry because if you get it wrong this time you won’t the next. Or if you do it won’t be in the same way.

I’ll clean myself now, wipe the muck from my hands and shake the flour from my arms.

Isn’t it so disappointing to learn that the secret behind something is hard work and repetition? Of course, there is a certain type of person who finds that knowledge freeing, that by imitating machinery you can progress. That you can achieve something if you just try hard enough, that success isn’t tinged with magic and doesn’t require any special aptitude or understanding. Everything is actually always a mix of both, it’s just that if you’re good enough at something it doesn’t feel like a mystery anymore.

I cover the bowl with a damp towel and set it in the oven. It’s warmer in there. I’ll get the one I prepped in a moment, but you can’t not wait at all. It’s a piece of the experience.

Some people say that cooking is an art and baking is a science. I think that maybe there’s some truth somewhere in that, but it can’t be the way I live my life, it’s a brittle, sad view of the world. Cooking is preparing food to stay alive, and there are ways to make it taste better, but baking is magic. There’s obviously chemistry involved, just like when you light a match or dye your clothes, but is the chemistry really what you care about?

When I say magic, I know I have a couple of times, I mean a spiritual connection to the truths that govern us and the things we touch in this world. I am not explicitly a witch. I grew up in the church, actually, and while my history there is fraught, and I am no longer a member of a congregation, one thing—maybe this will surprise you, I’m not sure what you find surprising—but one thing that always got me, connected me to it, was the mystery of our faith bit, I was Catholic, the part where the priest holds up the glass, and he holds up the wafer and he tells you that because we’re all there and believing it, communing, that this wine is blood, actually, and this bread is flesh, real flesh.

It’s difficult to wrap your head around, but I understood it, the way you understand things that you can’t explain but know are true. That kept me around longer than maybe I would have stayed otherwise. That and Mary and the saints. Jesus is an entirely separate thing that I don’t feel properly equipped to talk about, but Mary and the saints I felt inspired by.

Not necessarily the ones who are saints because of how Christian they were and how that got them killed by pagans, but the ones who got celebrated for their complete pursuit of goodness, who just had to treat people so well and reach in to the realm of impossibility to be so good that it’s miraculous. I loved them. My favorite is Saint Hubert. Hubertus. He was the best hunter in the world, until one day an angel appeared in a stag’s horns and told him to treat all living things with kindness, so he stopped hunting forever and became an advocate for animals. He is the patron saint of hunters, which is perverse, and maybe illustrative of why the church cannot be trusted with all of the beautiful things it owns. As a vegetarian, I claim him.

While you think on that, I’m pulling out a beautiful, springy dough from a secret place, where I’ve kept it from you, like magic or a miracle, and I place it here on the counter between us. This is what you get to.

A prime ingredient in baking and in life is patience, you’ll need to wait until you’ve waited long enough. How long is that? How many hours? Well I don’t know, how warm is your house, or how cold? What day of the week is it? There are factors to take into consideration, and there’s no point in spelling out all of the variables and making a math equation when the real answer is that when you push your thumb in hard enough to make an impression it feels puffy and bounces part, but not all, of the way back.

I’ll flour the counter.

My grandmother had the most powerful thumbs, for shelling things and pinching and cracking open pistachios and snapping her fingers louder than a normal person could, or, if you had a headache or a sore back, she could ask you where, and then dig that thumb in just right, hard enough to where you think it might hurt, but it doesn’t actually, because she picked the exact only place where pressure makes what ails you go away. Some of that is knowledge, you can learn about how the body works, there is medicine and massage and acupuncture. You can figure out how to make a dough, but a different part, a larger bit, is that she was special.

Food and everything else is all chemicals and minerals and atoms all arranged in specific ways, but is it really? Is that what you are? Just a bunch of stuff that’s mixed with water and formed into the shape of you? The answer is yes, literally, but it’s also no, obviously.

Now we roll it out.

I say we not because you’re helping me now, but because I hope you take part in this at some point, later.

Do you ever not recognize the sound of your own voice? In a recording or a home video or something? I know it’s normal to not like the sound of it because it’s a natural instinct to hate yourself that all of us need to always be vigilant in the fight against, but I mean something different, to not recognize it at all.

Or, different but the same, are you ever in a bath or a pool or some other still, beautiful body of water, and when you’re there do you ever lower every inch of yourself under except for your nose so that you can stay there forever submerged but still be alive? And when you’re in the floating state of forever non-drowning, do you close your eyes and direct your energy to the insides of your ears so that you’re hearing your own body, your heartbeat and the wispy in and out of your lungs, the perpetual motions of the machinery that mean you’re a living person not a dead one, and think, that blood pumping and that air moving doesn’t sound very substantial, there is barely anything keeping my eyes open and my brain functioning, I am not made of much. And then, after you reach that conclusion, does something stick in your mind that won’t let you settle on the idea that you’re only your physical self, and after analyzing the sounds of your human function you know that there must be some larger, more powerful, constantly churning essence that is a clearer definition of who you actually are? But then, after that positive thought, do you listen back into the rasp of your lungs and realize that it is the job of your leaking, sweating, impossibly fragile body to carry that soul around and express the truth of your true self to the Earth and its creatures? And even though that feels like it can’t be done, do you ever decide that you’ll try anyway?

Don’t say anything, it’s rhetorical.

It’s succeeding in that pursuit, the balance of who you have the potential to be with the disappointing physical reality of our world, that is what sainthood is all about, also dancing, and frequently baking.

So this is flat. Now I use a mix that I make, it’s cinnamon and mace and nutmeg and sugar and brown sugar and if I’m feeling like anything else I’ll add it in, that’s all mixed up, and I just layer it on here evenly. It isn’t so much the ingredients as it is the purpose behind them.

I cover it evenly in a blanket of spice.

Aside from a general aura of power and non-physical strength, she was also miraculous, my grandmother. I have mentioned the curing of pain and physical ailments with pressure from her thumbs, but there is also the story, I wasn’t there for this, but I’ve heard it a number of times, where she was walking through a dry riverbed with my great-uncles, her brothers, near where they grew up, and they were kicking rocks and poking things with sticks, and then my great-uncle Timothy shoved his arm into a hole in the ground saying that he was going to find a diamond, and before they could stop him he had done it already and come out screaming with a shining black snake stuck to it. My great-uncle Bill looked at it and then at Timothy in his eyes and said to him, “Timothy, you’re going to die, and I will miss you until we see each other again in heaven once I’ve lived a long and happy life. I love you, brother.“

Now, once it’s on there evenly, I roll it up into a spiral and then we’re going to cut discs that are about an inch, inch and a quarter thick.

The snake was three or four times as big as this, and I think that you or I both would have been paralyzed with fear.

But my grandmother grabbed the wriggling snake that was still pumping venom into Timothy’s arm firmly, with both hands, and whispered to it, “This was a mistake, I’m sorry we scared you”, and then it released its jaw and slid back home, then she told Bill to go run for help, so he took off. Then, she sat her brother down and said, “Timothy, you’ve made a mistake and those are painful, but let’s keep you alive. Don’t breathe so fast, and keep your heart low and smooth.” Then she laid his arm out and used the nail of her thumb to make circles around the edge of the bite marks the two fangs had left. And the skin within the circle she made started to turn bright red then orange, and to pucker and bleed and pus, but she kept making the circle, and all of the evil stayed inside of it.

She did that for three hours, until her hand was cramped and Timothy was too tired to keep crying. She kept going until my great-grandmother showed up with the doctor from town, which wasn’t close, and he looked at the situation and knew that something beautiful and strange was happening. He was sad to have to take out his saw and remove the arm of my great-uncle just above the elbow. They buried it right there at the riverbed, and the doctor said to my grandmother that it’s unfortunate to have no arm, but he really ought to be dead.

Things turned out. Timothy ended up being a baseball pitcher in high school because he still had his good arm, and he never had to go to war.

My grandmother learned then that she had a power over the natural laws that govern all things on earth. Like the introduction of deadly venom into a child’s bloodstream, or the way your muscles tighten up, or the chemistry that goes into whatever you’re putting in the oven. What else do you call that apart from miraculous?

You space them just a little bit apart from each other, even, they’ll expand in the oven. When you watch this all happen, and you hear that word, miracle, do you make the connection to what you’re capable of?

When I put it away in the refrigerator for the night I like to spend the evening by myself and contemplate my place in history. How I’m connected to my lineage, and, or, removed from it. When the time comes I encourage you to do the same, but I did it yesterday so we can keep moving along.

I put the pan into the oven and I check my watch and I mark the time in my head, and I wait. Twenty minutes or so at 350. You’ll know from the look of them. Everything is flexible, and expecting perfection is the one sure way to avoid it.

You know, in churches, they’ll keep a whole body or a little piece of a saint, or part of something they owned. It’s called a relic. A bone or a shroud or a finger. It’s not magic necessarily, but it’s the presence of something that belonged to someone that touched perfection that’s supposed to help nudge us along in the right direction. On whose intercession we rely is what it says in the prayer.

I don’t know how they’re selected or where exactly they get them, the churches and the relics, but I know how I got mine.

Why I’ve been on this while I tell you about the buns is that it’s because of them actually that I came to this understanding, the one I currently have, that you can pass on more than a recipe to the people who descend from you, that you can live on through what they do.

The buns have always been my favorite, and after she was gone, years ago now, I kept trying and trying and trying to make them by myself, to try to get to a feeling, to a memory, but I was emptied out by grief and all of my buns were either burned or sort of pale and lifeless, or occasionally they’d look right, but they’d taste off, or like nothing at all.

And I realized, I knew it quickly, that the reason was because they were her. The buns come from her, but they also are her, the herness of them is their perfection, and if I’m going to make them then she needs to be with me. Like I’ve said a number of times, I don’t really know so much about the science behind it, I care more about the end result.

Our family has a mausoleum, a little stone house for the broken remnants of the bodies we used to live in to lie together dead, with compartments reserved for everyone down to two generations from me if we get there. If she’d been truly buried or burned I don’t know what I would have done, but she wasn’t, so I went in and I pried open her space, and then I, firmly but gently, pulled on the thumb of her right hand and tugged it free. Then I closed it all up and brought the relic home, and I put it in the little jar that I use to keep salt, and then, the first thing I did was make this recipe.

When they were ready, the next morning, it was like she was here with me, because she is, she always is, she’s a part of all of it, and, if I can remember that, and if you can, live with her spirit and ask for her help, just like you’d say a prayer, you can make the best cinnamon buns you’ve ever had in your entire life.

A little while longer. Patience, like I said.

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