Mozzarella Pie

I was packing my things during the first lights of Christmas Eve, and I planned to leave before noon, I didn’t want to pass one more second of my life with the terrible people that my parents were.
You see, my parents are both alcoholics and ex drug addicts. Their life had always been miserable, and my existence only worsened their already crumbling mental state. They would scorn at me every time I achieved something in my life, even the smallest things, and would badmouth me with neighbors and strangers. They spited me, they knew I wasn’t going to end up like them and they resented me for this. 
They knew I would amount to something in my life. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t consider myself to be the perfect daughter, nor do I think I am some kind of great person that deserves the world. What I do consider myself to be is a human being that deserves basic respect. And my parents never once in their miserable lives gave it to me. This is the reason why, three months or so after my 18th birthday, I decided I wanted to leave my house and my family behind for good. I worked many part time jobs, my grades suffered from this but I had to, and I even did some things I am not really proud of, mainly scams, but I really needed to get out of there, and in a year I managed to finally leave that god forsaken home. 
As I already said, I left home on Christmas Eve. I planned to leave without telling a soul, but that hysteric woman that is my decrepit mother woke up to the sound of my footsteps, even though I was being extra careful not to make any sound and realized what I was up to after she saw all my luggage. She lost it right there and then. She started shouting at me, she said I was an ungrateful bitch, and then she started to throw things at me. I managed to pack the last things I would surely need, and I left everything else behind.
I left without looking back and I never even saw my father that day. I remember my mother sobbing as she looked me entering the taxi I had previously called.
As I arrived at my new apartment, I felt an extreme sense of accomplishment. I knew I could finally start to live an ordinary and fulfilling life. 
The first thing I did, since it was winter break and I had nothing better to do, was to unpack what little I had brought with me. This is where everything went wrong. 
You see, when my mother was throwing things at me, she mainly threw objects she could reach laying somewhere between my room and the living room. Most of what was thrown consisted of books and magazines (but that crackhead also hit me with a damn razor). Now, my parents didn’t even know what a book was, so I naturally grabbed everything that consisted of paper and ink and threw it in my bag, assuming they were college textbooks or literature. For the most part I was right, but then I found a book I had never seen. It was kind of dusty, but didn’t seem to be an old production, at least not older than 2010. It looked like a cookbook of some sort, but it was very, very big. We’re talking like the whole Lord of The Rings big.
The title of the book was an extremely uninspired Recipes. It had no author, no editor, no credits, no date of print, nothing. It didn’t even have an ISBN or a bar code. I thought it was weird, but I was also kind of curious, so I started to read the first pages.
What I found after reading a few recipes was very unusual, and it also explained the size of this cookbook. The recipes were explained in every little detail, and I mean every single one: it even told you the obvious like “wash your hands before touching the ingredients,” and “take the ingredients with your hands.” The weirdest thing was that even recipes for extremely easy meals with little ingredients, like a simple toast, were written so meticulously they took at least three pages each.
Another notable thing was that next to the title of the recipe, was listed its exact origin in this manner: date, place, name of inventor. For example, if I were to invent a recipe today, next to its name it would look like this: 11/13/2022; 28 B Nova Lane, London, UK; Jacqueline Burns.
Even if the book was weird in its overdetailed explanations, I found myself to be captivated by it, and I also felt very inspired. And as I cooked with the help of this book, I became good at making homemade meals. Since I had never cooked before I started small, and I followed every single step to make sure I never messed up anything, but as I grew more and more confident with my newfound cooking skills, I started to skip the obvious steps, as time went by my brain developed the ability to completely ignore superfluous steps. Every time I followed a recipe and completed it, I felt a sense of immeasurable joy. A joy so extreme it made me want to keep cooking.
Every night I would dream of having friends over for lunch or dinner. They would commend me and my skills, and they would show great surprise at the strange cookbook I was using. Some of them swore they had already seen it somewhere, but no one could ever pinpoint where or when. In one of my dreams my girlfriend’s brother, Timothy, who worked in a publishing house, started to investigate the origin of this book, and he would frequently text me asking to send him the book, but I always refused.
As I kept preparing meals and reading further into the comically big book, the recipes started to get more and more complex. I even begun to find exotic foods or very specific meals belonging to certain regions of a determined state or even just cities and villages. Then I happened upon something very weird. I had reached the last recipe of the book, but it wasn’t on the last page. The book had at least another 300 pages on it, but they were all blank, it was weird, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. I was in that house for two and a half years now, and I was using that book the whole time, I had frankly assumed the book to be an unfinished copy that found its way into my parents’ house, and the blank pages were probably a placeholder. I soon found out that those pages were placeholders indeed.
The name of the last recipe was Mozzarella Pie but there was no date, place, or inventor this time around. The process of this recipe was even more detailed than the rest, taking a whopping 34 pages to explain the whole process. I was intrigued and I decided to try it out right away, as I always did.
When I started working on this Mozzarella Pie, I felt anxious, even though I had no idea why. With every step I followed I felt more and more tired. By the time I had finished I was fainting. I stopped working, and I realized only then what time it was. I couldn’t believe I had not done anything but make this pie for 36 hours straight. It had felt like three, three and a half hours at most, and I didn’t even realize how many missed calls I had in my phone. I made my way towards the phone to pick it up, I had to walk slowly because everything hurt, my head was spinning, and I was feverish. I felt like I was falling apart… No, I felt like I was melting. 
I checked the missed calls. There were thousands of them. My girlfriend, my friends, even my parents. As I was looking at the phone I began to cry. I realized only now how much I had missed them all. I had been locked up in my kitchen for more than two years, baking and cooking. 
As the tears flooded in my eyes and distorted my vision, the kitchen I was so used to started to disappear. Now I could hear the pained cries full of sorrow of my fellow cooks. 
They are there with me, in the infinite kitchen, baking and cooking. As I watch the big book right in front of me, towering over all of us, I can feel deep inside my very soul a new memory. I can see a vision of what is happening now that I am no longer in the realm of the living. The Book of Recipes is showing me my legacy: my Mozzarella Pie is being served to my friends, cooked by Timothy in my honor. Why would he honor me by making that? Because he had read it. I can see it clearly in the colossal book. He had read the recipe.
Mozzarella Pie - 11/13/2022; 28 B Nova Lane, London, UK; Jacqueline Burns.
And now it is the last recipe no more.
Category:Books