“Xanadu” Cocktail with Artisanal Ice
Sasha Brown
Ingredients
Two grains of opium
Tell them it’s for dysentery.
3 oz absinthe or other alcohol
One honeydew melon
Artisanal, hand-carved, locally sourced ice
One axe for the frozen sea (below).
Directions
Brew “Milk of Paradise” by dissolving opium into the alcohol. Stir briskly.
In the garden beneath the pleasure dome, muddle the honeydew.
a. Keep the honeydew separate.
Now all you need is ice! Weave a coracle from reeds on the banks of the river Alph.
a. Ahead of you, the river rushes into a chasm.
Voyage into its shadowed mouth, whirling through the torrent; emerge in a subterranean sea under a measureless cavern of ice.
a. Raise your torch so the flame glimmers off stalactites that have never before seen light.
b. In the center of this vast cavern is a wide pillar of ice. It descends into the depths and soars to the ceiling.
c. Entombed in that azure column is a dark form.
Chip artisanal ice from the region around the form.
a. Do not carve the dark form loose. It could be Frankenstein, frozen in the icy depths. Carve close, but not too close. Do not thaw Frankenstein.
i. It doesn’t matter whether Frankenstein means the monster or the doctor. Don’t thaw either of them.
ii. Maybe it’s not Frankenstein. Maybe it’s a yeti. A dinosaur. Kafka’s icy sister. Captain America. It doesn’t matter. Don’t thaw anyone.
b. You’re getting too close. The creature is stirring.
i. shit
The ice moans and cracks around that monstrous form. The pillar shatters. Great boulders of ice splash into the sea around you. The ceiling groans; your coracle overturns. Dripping and freezing, clamber onto an ice floe.
a. Weave three circles to contain the creature.
b. Not like that! It’s not a spell! Literally weave circles. Use the reeds from the coracle.
c. The weaving is going poorly. This would go better if you were a better weaver.
d. The creature looms over you, a shadowed bulk against the cracked blue vault. It reaches out with an ice-encrusted hand, but it doesn’t want you. It wants your cocktail.
e. It’s okay if it gets some of the honeydew, but definitely don’t let it get the milk of paradise. Are you listening? Don’t–
i. shit
f. The ice is broken; the thing is loose. It stoops and peers at you with eyes of endless azure. You feel its breath, intimate and pungent. This is what you came for. You never intended to follow the recipe, did you? You didn’t want the cocktail. You wanted the monster.
Behind the recipe:
A bonus segment? A bonus segment!
What’s this recipe really about, Sasha?
This piece is about being silly and smooshing a bunch of literary jokes together, but also! Art! In Kubla Khan, Coleridge uses ice to talk about art; Kafka says "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us," and there’s Anna Kavan, whose 1967 novel Ice is about heroin but also art and which her publisher called “Kafka meets The Avengers.” I wanted to talk about the rituals & substances we use to break through all that ice into our ids, the really deep art shit, which Coleridge embodies as a scary monster. Also I put a yeti because I thought it was funny.
Recipes are a cool angle on art because they engage with you, the reader, directly; they boss you around. As instructions for how to copy someone else’s creation, they’re sort of the antithesis of art. It was fun for me to have the ending reveal You, the reader, as someone who's been subverting the recipe all along - an unreliable reader with a different agenda. As we all tend to be, when we do recipes.
About the author:
Sasha Brown’s dog is named Leo, he’s like yay big. Sasha’s surreal fiction is in lit mags like X-R-A-Y and Masters Review: New Voices, and in genre mags like Bourbon Penn and F&SF. He’s on twitter @dantonsix and online at sashabrownwriter.com. Leo is on the couch.
