Humans Are Clumsy
It was a sad affair.
"Fuck... my tuna mayo...!"
"I told you how many times to check the condition first before you start cheering."
The tuna mayo I'd been reunited with after half a year hadn't even lasted that long before falling apart. That was the story. They say the greater the expectation, the greater the disappointment, and that particular saying, at least, was dead-on accurate.
"They had master's degrees and PhDs and it still couldn't last half a year..."
"If a triangle kimbap lasts half a year, that's not kimbap anymore. That's a preservative, isn't it?"
"Don't care."
If they'd just stuffed it with preservatives, my tuna mayo would've arrived as happiness at the end of a six-month wait. I stared at the five packs that would probably drop me with stomach cramps if I swallowed them, and swallowed my tears instead.
Harin, looking at me like I was being ridiculous, dumped the sprawled-out tuna mayo into the trash.
"Hey, so."
"Don't care."
"Couldn't we just make tuna mayo ourselves?"
"...Huh?"
I stared at her, blank.
"We've got instant rice, canned tuna, even the seaweed — all of it. We just need to figure out the mayonnaise. We could even make tuna mayo rice balls baked in the oven, couldn't we?"
"Why are you only saying this after six months."
"What. The person who likes it should've thought of it themselves. I'm not a tuna mayo evangelist."
Now that I thought about it, she was fucking right. Why had I never once considered just making tuna mayo myself? Every last ingredient was sitting right here from all the scavenging.
Well.
You a fucking idiot?
You're a total fucking idiot after all!
I was an idiot certified by Motherless Cha, Charles Darwin, and the AI besides.
In that spirit, tonight's dinner would be homemade tuna mayo and the sesame ramen I'd stockpiled from months of scavenging.
"Hmm... not sure I can actually make mayonnaise, though."
"I can't. I've barely ever cooked."
Store-bought mayo had taken a beating from the ice age and been unusable for a long time already. The oil, water, and egg had fully separated, leaving behind something too ambiguous and half-formed to still call mayonnaise.
"Yeah, I wasn't expecting anything from you anyway."
"Hey."
True to my faith as a tuna mayo evangelist, I at least knew how to make mayonnaise. Egg yolk, cooking oil, vinegar or lemon juice, mustard, salt — with those, it wasn't supposed to be that hard. The problem was that the eggs were all frozen solid, and thawing them wouldn't make them fit for mayonnaise.
"The eggs are frozen too, so this is, nngh..."
"Can't we just thaw them and use them?"
Harin tilted her head and asked. As far as I knew, once-frozen eggs couldn't make mayonnaise.
"Pretty sure not."
"We should still try, though?"
"...Fine."
I knew it wouldn't work with eggs that had already frozen once, but I decided to try it her way anyway. Two eggs, thawed beside the oven.
"Hmm."
"Mm."
The shells cracked and the yolk membranes burst, the yolks spilling out already mixed with the whites. From the jump, it had the distinct smell of being completely fucked. I could already hear the scream of mayonnaise that would never be, echoing back from the future.
"Even like this?"
"We should still... try, right?"
Stubborn as hell, this one. I liked that about her too, of course, but I'd have preferred she not headbutt brick walls in fields she knew nothing about.
"If something weird comes out, you're eating all of it."
"Ah, why!"
I added salt, lemon juice, and mustard to the gloopy eggs and mixed hard. Watching the ingredients come together, the signs were already bad. The emulsion wasn't taking, so it looked like I'd need a little more mustard. I adjusted and added, trying to resuscitate the sorry state of this dubious egg mixture.
And then.
"Pour the oil in a little at a time."
"Yes."
Harin dribbled cooking oil from a cup into the bowl, and I kept stirring and mixing the egg mixture without pause. How long did that go on. Roughly fifteen minutes, I'd guess, of whisking and folding without a single break. I felt the payoff of all that training and muscle-building while making mayonnaise.
"..."
"Woooow..."
Of course, the only problem was that the result kept screaming that scream I'd predicted, the one that had started in the underworld. The emulsion had failed, and a neatly stratified collection of liquids, like a three-layer cocktail, sat in the glass and said hello.
"You eat every last bit."
"Ah, why..."
"That's the penalty."
Wasting ingredients in a world with no resupply — leave it to Chef Rin, culinary researcher of the underworld. I hadn't wanted to believe it.
So I shoved a spoonful of ruined mayonnaise into Harin's mouth, and the other method that occurred to me a beat too late was vegan mayo made with soy milk. I was sure I'd seen something somewhere about soy milk mayonnaise for vegans. I hadn't given it a second glance at the time, but with store-bought mayo and eggs all thoroughly wrecked, it was the only way out.
"If this fails, you eat it all, oppa. What kind of mayonnaise do you make with soy milk."
"Yeah, don't care."
I glanced at Harin, who was pouting, then shook the thawed soy milk hard and poured it into a deep bowl. From what I remembered, the method was a little different from regular mayonnaise. I added sugar, salt, and vinegar, measured the oil at a one-to-one ratio with the soy milk, and dumped it all in.
"Hand me the blender."
"Here."
It was only after I'd burned all my strength in the wrong place that I remembered we had a blender. I took the one Harin held out and plunged it into the bowl.
Wiiiiiiirrr—
I should've done it this way from the start. People are stupid, so the body always suffers before the brain finally catches up.
"Ah, I should've done it like this earlier."
"Dummy."
Fucking easy. The soy milk mayonnaise was getting blended within an inch of its life, coming together with a texture nothing like before.
"If this fails, you eat it again."
"Ah, why!"
"Don't you take that tone."
I let the blender run for about two minutes. What came out was nothing like before — a white, fluffy mayonnaise. The smell wasn't weird at all, the texture was fine, and it had turned out far more decent than I'd expected.
"Ladies first?"
"Fuck off."
I immediately scooped a small spoonful into my mouth, and then I had no choice but to hang my head and mutter.
"Yeah. This was sex.... Ah... it's been so long..."
"What, wait, for real? Really? Huh?"
Not that I actually came without getting hard, but like a conditioned reflex I had no choice but to drop into a tear-soaked Marine Dragoon stance.
Mayonnaise. This was, without a doubt, mayonnaise. True mayonnaise, certified by a tuna mayo expert, sat right in front of me.
To be honest in my assessment: it was mayonnaise that inevitably tasted like soy, and a tuna mayo triangle kimbap that, even shaped identically, couldn't help but taste faintly different.
"Ah, this is it.... This was the sex of those days."
"That good?"
"Yeah."
Still, the fact that every single bite was so fucking delicious that tears streamed down my face was undeniable. Every time I took a big bite of homemade tuna mayo, chewed, swallowed, and then knocked back the sesame ramen broth, the word sex tumbled out of my mouth on its own.
"This is too good. Ah, I'm losing it."
"Eat a lot. Here."
I'd already demolished three tuna mayos and two sesame ramens and I was still reaching for the next one. Even I thought I looked like an idiot, but the tears kept pricking and spilling over.
But tuna mayo and sesame ramen were never just food to me. They were a memory that ran all the way back to childhood. A handful of the only things that had held me together in a time when every single day was nothing but pain.
"I'm happy."
"You look it."
And Harin just watched me. She wasn't even eating what was in front of her. She just sat there with a gentle smile, looking at me like that.
"What are you doing not eating. The ramen's getting soggy."
"Mm, I don't know. Sitting like this reminds me of the old days a little. I like it."
She said that and closed her eyes for a moment, as if picturing some scene. Naturally, she opened her mouth before I did and started talking.
"Even when we used to run into each other at the convenience store as a part-timer and a customer, I never thought it'd turn out like this. Did you?"
"Well. Back then we were living in completely different worlds."
Back then I was a debt-ridden orphan brat carrying every misery the world had to offer, and back then Harin was a kind, bright young woman who seemed to be carrying all of its happiness. I wasn't trying to be self-deprecating about it now. That was just the landscape. That was just the fact of it.
Only — Harin's expression was bashful.
"What are you talking about."
Before I knew it, as if I'd been infected by her, I set down the food I'd been shoveling in and just looked at her.
"I mean it. I used to sit in that convenience store and wait for 6:40 every single time."
"What kind of time is that."
Waiting for 6:40 every day was a pretty out-of-nowhere thing to say.
"The time you came. You always showed up at 6:40 and picked tuna mayo and sesame ramen."
"..."
She said it like it was the most natural thing in the world — a fact I hadn't even known about myself — and let out a little heehee of a laugh, like she was enjoying this.
"You never knew, but if the tuna mayo and sesame ramen looked like they were going to sell out before you got there, I always hid one of each."
"..."
"I didn't even register it as liking you back then, which is weird, right? You always opened the door at 6:40, so at 6:39 I'd sneak them back out and put them on the shelf."
"..."
She said all of this — a story I could never have known — with her face going shyly red. Thinking about it, from some point on, without a single exception, there had always been at least one sesame ramen and one tuna mayo left.
"I don't know. Remembering that just makes me happy for no reason. Maybe this is what they mean when they say you get full just watching someone eat."
"..."
"There's more, so eat a lot, oppa."
And so my heart went thump-thump. The things that always slammed my heart were two feelings. The pounding of excitement toward Harin, and the pounding of guilt toward Harin. The two of them always coexisted in my chest, so even looking at her like this, I couldn't just think she was adorable.
"...Me too."
My insides churned.