Ingredients

• 6 cups of dark-grape must made by Maenads earlier that day, the apple of your eye stomping fiercest of them all, red splattering her bare legs like the blood rushing to your cheeks, her teeth flashing as she laughed and screamed like you wished to

• ¾ cups of flour from the family sack

• ¼ cups of semolina

• fragrant geranium leaves from the pot you’ve watered with your tears when no one was looking

• a single cinnamon stick

• almonds and walnuts, crushed like your hopes that wait for the Maenads to be reborn

Directions

❧ The Maenads will boil the must in great big cauldrons tonight, singing and dancing around a crackling bronze fire. You can’t—squash your envy, kindle your longing into a modest fire in your home’s hearth. Careful not to wake the family that eats off your hands. Fill the largest cauldron of your smaller set, the one you played homemaker with before you became one, before you gave up your wants.

❧ You were taught to add white soil while the must is boiling to remove its impurities. Do not. Leave the must as impure as your thoughts when you watched the Maenads’ feast, hungry eyes over a wall that hid you.

❧ Add flour and semolina, stirring with a wooden spoon. Bring your desire’s face to your mind with every turn and let the must burn as long as your desire burns, but put out the flames before they burn you. You don’t know the Maenads’ way around the fire yet.

❧ When the blend sets, flavor it with the geranium leaves and let it cool by the moonlight.

❧ Transfer the blend to the new ceramic pot you bought with money you earned on your own—by selling your weavings or your body on the sly, the Maenads will be the last to judge—and throw the residue at the cauldron’s bottom out, along with your regrets.

❧ Divide the blend in bowls, one for you and one for your Maenad, one for your past and one for your future. While it’s still warm, rain cinnamon and crushed almonds and walnuts over it.

❧ Serve (or don’t anymore) the pudding cold. It will fill your insides and lull you to a final sleep, stolen in the crack of dawn, like Maenads’ slumber after the night’s feast. Wined and spiced, fed and full, you’ll wake to what you wished for.