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I made a note to make it watery like this for next time I made her coffee.
“Do you like bacon?” I said.
“Yes!” Vicky said.
She started at her own outburst.
“They only had alien food back at Star Cross’d Lovers,” she said. “I can’t eat anything that’s wriggling and still alive.”
“How about sausages?” I said. “And toast?”
She nodded excitedly.
I searched for the ingredients in the fridge. I had everything she asked for—even if it was with a slight Titan twist. I fried her what she wanted. I also cooked her a bunch of Titan delicacies that she’d never tried before. I cooked them in a separate pan so they wouldn’t affect the flavor of the things she knew she liked.
“What’s this?” she said, nodding to the larger pan heaped with food items I’d specially curated for her.
“Things Titans usually eat in the morning,” I said. “It’s not an exhaustive list but as you seem to like fried food, I figured you might like to try some.”
“Crispy food,” Vicky said.
“What?”
“I like crispy food, not fried food. It just so happens that the best crispy food is also the fried stuff.”
She finished her bacon and eggs and toast before picking through the Titan traditional meals.
“What’s this?” she said.
“Those are cut colds of meat from various animals in the empire,” I said. “This one is called a hexadodron. It makes milk.”
“A cow!” Vicky said. “We have something similar back home.”
“But do your cows produce a dozen different flavors?”
“No. Do they all taste good?”
“No. They’re… an acquired taste. Some you will hate, others you will like, and maybe one or two, you will love. We feed them to Titan children to see what kind of personality and life they might have later. It’s a silly tradition but it’s part of our culture.”
“That’s interesting. I know in some Asian cultures, they do something similar. On the baby’s first birthday, they present them with a bunch of different items. The baby will choose one and whatever it chooses, it represents the kind of life they will have later. Money means they will be rich. A diploma means they will be a professor. Things like that.”
“Do the parents cheat and try to get the child to choose what they want them to?”
“Of course. They make the baby keep choosing until it picks the thing they want. Usually the money.”
I laughed.
“Parents here are the same,” I said. “No matter what, they always want what they think is best for the child, even if it turns out it’s not what the child wants.”
Vicky looked up and cocked her head to one side. It took me a moment to realize why she looked at me like that.
She thinks I’m referring to my own parents!
But I wasn’t.
Was I?
I quickly changed the subject.
