ds_flashfiction | Not much of a recipe...

Sweetness in the arctic, 1007 words including recipe. Big, big thanks to

justacat for the speed-beta.

He found Ray standing in the snow, one cold-reddened hand holding his coffee mug upside down. His shoulders were slumped, and he was staring down into the snow with a frown that would have been comical if it didn’t seem so sad.

As he got closer, he could see that Ray had packed down a patch of snow, and poured the mug’s contents out in swirls and loops which had melted through the surface. Fraser was a few feet away, about to ask Ray what he’d been doing, when he noticed the smell: not coffee, as he’d expected, but maple syrup. It was sufficiently unexpected to silence him until he’d reached Ray’s side.

At close range, as he slipped his arms around Ray’s waist, the frown on his partner’s face revealed itself to be more pensive than sad. Ray leaned slightly against him and said quietly, “So what’d I do wrong, Frase?”

He still hadn’t figured out what Ray had been doing to begin with, so the best he could muster as an answer was, “What do you mean, Ray?” He struggled to work out what Ray was really asking; surely this was something more than maple syrup in the snow. Something to do with today’s therapy session, no doubt.

“Did I make it too hot? Is it the wrong kind of syrup? I thought if it was real maple syrup it would work, but it’s exactly the same as happened last time.”

Fraser stared down at the brown-streaked snow some more. Finally, he said, quite truthfully, “I have no idea.”

Ray straightened up and looked him in the face. “You have no idea?”

Fraser shook his head, and Ray yanked his hat off and rubbed one ear. “Wait, say that again. You have no idea?”

He couldn’t hold back a smile. Relief rushed him like spring thaw. “None whatsoever, Ray.”

“Wait, so, I screwed something up, and you can’t tell me how I should’ve done it?”

“I don’t even know what you were trying to do.”

Ray blinked a couple of times, smiling back, and then collapsed against him, causing Fraser to stagger back a step before he caught his balance. “My, uh, my world picture is shaking here, buddy. I am shocked.”

Fraser rolled his eyes, and then flipped Ray down into the snow, kissing him soundly as they rolled clear of the maple syrup. When he let Ray breathe again, he came up laughing. “You’re not helping my equidistribution any, Fraser.”

He pulled Ray into a sitting position and brushed snow out of his spiky hair, and instead of equilibrium, he said, “So enlighten me, then, Ray.”

“I was trying to make maple candy,” Ray said, as though it were obvious, smiling and wriggling as snow found its way under his jacket. “But it didn’t work. I think I made the syrup too hot, I don’t remember what they said exactly in the book.”

Fraser frowned, racking his brain for any book in the modest collection he kept that might include instructions for candy-making.

Ray shook his head. “I read it a long time ago. Stella had all these books from when she was little, when she had a bad day she’d grab one and curl up on the couch and read half the night. When we’d been married a while, she started getting on me about boxing, didn’t like me doing it, and I said, What, you want me to do what you do when I have a bad day? And she said, You could try it. So I grabbed a book and tried it. Made it halfway through before she interrupted me.”

He hated the faraway look in Ray’s eyes–-mine, you’re mine now–-but at least he understood now. Therapy for Ray tended to mean talking about either Stella or his parents, so it always stirred memories. “Interrupted you?” he kept his voice soft, reached out to brush a bit of snow off Ray’s neck.

Ray’s mouth smiled, though his downcast eyes didn’t. “Yeah, she, uh. She liked the way I looked, reading. Didn’t do it very often.”

Fraser thought of Ray, reading a children’s book with his glasses on and a determined scowl, and felt a twinge of sympathy for Stella. Among other feelings.

Ray looked up, and whatever he saw made him smile for real. “I tried the candy thing before, when I first read it, but it didn’t work. But I got home today, and I saw the snow, and I thought, what the hell, I’ll try it again. Maybe it’ll be different here. Mountie-style real maple syrup. Serious snow. Maybe it could work this time.”

Fraser looked toward the patch of snow where Ray had performed his experiment, and felt a little of the disappointment that had weighted Ray’s shoulders a few minutes ago. “But it didn’t.”

He was knocked face first into the snow, and then Ray was rolling him over, kissing him breathless. When Ray leaned up again, he was grinning against a bright sky, shaking his head, and Fraser could only grin back, bewildered by his good fortune. “There you go being wrong again, Fraser. What am I gonna do with you?”

Ray stood before Fraser could offer any of the many suggestions that flashed through his mind, and pulled him to his feet. Fraser picked up Ray’s mug, still dripping maple syrup, and held it out, but Ray immediately dropped it back into the snow. “C’mon,” he said, towing Fraser toward the cabin. “I want candy.”

And the recipe,

“One morning she boiled molasses and sugar together until they made a thick syrup, and Pa brought in two pans of clean, white snow from outdoors. Laura and Mary each had a pan, and Pa and Ma showed them how to pour the dark syrup in little streams on to the snow.

They made circles, and curlicues, and squiggledy things, and these hardened at once and were candy.”

–-Laura Ingalls Wilder
Little House in the Big Woods

Current Music: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

brooklinegirl.livejournal.com

wow. way to fling me right back to my childhood. I knew exactly what Ray was doing, and where the idea must have come from, though I wasn't sure how you were going to connect Ray to Little House. And I gotta admit, I'm right there with Stella and Fraser: the mental image of Ray, glasses, scowl, reading...my oh my. So very yummy. Better than candy. Very, very nicely done.

From:

Not much of a recipe...

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