By Julie Wornan
Scene : a clearing in the woods, with a fire (a painted one, hopefully!)
Characters:
A CAVE MAN and a CAVE WOMAN
(standing or seated on either side of the fire)
A DISEMBODIED VOICE
WOMAN: I dreamed of a new kind of food…
MAN: New food? Sounds great! Can we get some? I’m tired of eating hunted animals every day.
WOMAN: Maybe we can make ourselves some. It’s called “Cookies”. It’s delicious.
MAN: Cookies? How can we get them?
WOMAN: First we’ll need some flour.
MAN: Flour?
WOMAN: I think I saw you gathering some wild grass seeds the other day. Do you still have them?
MAN: I gathered them because I thought they might be good to eat, but they didn’t taste very good. I threw them onto that hollow rock. They must be still there. They’ll be pretty dry by now.
WOMAN: That’s perfect! Now you have to pound them into a powder. That’s called “flour”.
MAN. Okay. (Pounds.)
WOMAN: Now we’ll need some eggs.
MAN: What kind of eggs?
WOMAN: Eggs from birds. Have you got any?
MAN: I’ve got two eggs from a wild pigeon.
WOMAN: Those will do nicely. Now you need to break the eggs open and pour them onto the flour.
MAN: Okay. (Does this).
WOMAN: Mix it up good.
MAN: Okay. (Mixes).
WOMAN: That’s great! Now we have a “batter”.
MAN: Batter. Okay.
WOMAN: Now one more thing. We’ll need some sugar.
MAN: Sugar? What’s sugar?
WOMAN: It’s something like honey. We could use honey from bees.
MAN: I did gather some honey the other day. Bee stung my finger. Ow!
WOMAN: Never mind, it’s worth it. These cookies will be terrific! Now pour the honey over the batter and mix it up well.
(MAN does that).
WOMAN: Wow, that looks good! Now we just need to bake it in an oven.
MAN: What’s an oven?
WOMAN: It’s something like a fire.
MAN: We have a fire.
WOMAN: So we do! Okay, so we’ll place small lumps of the batter on a flat rock and push it into the fire.
(They use their fingers to scoop up lumps of batter and shake them onto a rock. They lick their fingers now and again.)
DISEMBODIED VOICE: To continue, you must agree to our Cookies Policy.
MAN: Policy?
WOMAN: I don’t think we want a policy, whatever that is. We gotta stop.
About the Author
Julie Cohen Wornan
I'm a native New Yorker but my home is in France. After I retired as a computer programmer, I discovered the delight of writing for those irrational beings called People. I think of fantasy as a window into another reality. And, I like to write very short stories because Small is Beautiful. Some of my work has appeared on Bewildering Stories <http://www.bewilderingstories.com/> and AntipodeanSF <http://www.antisf.com/>.
If you like my stories, you can download my e-book titled "The Mutual Reverse See," from www.amazon.fr/The-Mutual-Reverse-See-ebook/dp/B007VDEHHQ
Photography is another hobby of mine. You can see some of my photo compositions on http://www.flickr.com/photos/julieeiluj/ .
I feel deep concern about the future of our one and only planet. (You do too, right?). So I wrote a graphic novel, "Saving Our Planet," to explain climate change to young people. It's available on amazon in 4 languages. And a song, "The Change of Climate", to the tune of "The Sound of Silence"; you can listen to it here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY5MKPGr8RA>.
Our weekly podcast features the stories from recently published issues, often narrated by the authors themselves.
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