PAN DE CRISTAL

February 6, 2022 Posie Brien

The television is on with the volume muted in the waiting room. She tries to avoid looking at it, concentrating instead on the magazine in her lap — a back issue of the New Yorker open to an article on tracking musk oxen in the Alaskan wilderness — but the persistent neon flashing proves impossible to ignore.

She sighs, and sets the magazine aside, folding one leg up underneath the other and adjusting her weight in the overstuffed chair. The news anchor’s million-watt smile fills the screen, just above the ticker tape of breaking updates scrolling slowly at the bottom of the frame. All anyone is talking about is the storm: up to 19 inches predicted for Pembroke, 24 for downtown Boston, and Sharon forecast to be inundated with almost 30.

BUTTERMILK CHEESE BISCUITS

November 19, 2021 Posie Brien

Her nerves feel as tangled up as a knotted shoelace, needing to be gently teased apart and smoothed. Jangled, that’s the word for it. The nerves—electric and snarled—are covering up other things: the persistent pulse of worry and the melancholy blue tinge of sadness and possibly even a fiery, flaming red anger, but she hasn’t dug down that far yet, unable to even touch the top layer.

CINNAMON TWISTS

October 30, 2021 Posie Brien

The floor in her bedroom is made of wide wooden planks. The apartment is on the 8th floor of an imposing limestone building on the corner of Commonwealth Avenue, a stone’s throw from the Boston Public Garden. Pale-colored brick covers part of the faded facade—this is a building that whispers old money and summers on Nantucket and Harvard alumni. Inside, the lobby reminds her of an aging patrician matriarch: once beautiful and still formidable, but time-worn and washed out. The walls are mirrored and an ancient green carpet directs visitors around a massive oak table upon which sits a flower arrangement so large you can barely see the doorman in his navy blazer. He sits at a marble-topped desk, the polished brass buttons dotting his lapel a perfect complement to the brass trimming along the wainscoting. Wainscoting: this was one of many words she’d never spoken aloud, or knew of, before she moved into apartment 8F. Part of her education is living in the rarified sphere of wealth of the Carlton House (she didn’t know apartment buildings could have names that sounded like prep school dormitories); part of it is Hadley.

TOASTED PECAN SUGAR DIRT BOMB MUFFINS

October 16, 2021 Posie Brien

Working at a start-up is exhausting—that’s how she puts it to everyone who asks whenever she travels home to the suburb where she grew up. Regardless of how unglamorous the reality, her parents' friends look impressed when they find out she’s living in the city, employed at a company that’s frequently cited in Forbes and Business Insider: a “hot” place to be, as her father’s friend Everett puts it. He tilts his old-fashioned at her, the ice rattling around the almost empty glass. Everett’s words are a little slurred as he says, “You’re in exactly the right place! Good for you for getting that pedigree. You got a head on your shoulders!” He nearly shouts the last bit, and she leans back to avoid any errant splashes of bourbon. Before she can respond, he’s shaking the glass in the direction of his wife, who’s wearing the exact same outfit she wears to every social function—regardless of the season or occasion: maroon tweed skirt, white turtleneck, black cashmere cardigan with a lizard-shaped brooch. Two tiny emeralds wink as the lizard’s eyes; when she was little, the brooch terrified her, keeping her from falling asleep some nights.

FRESH MOZZARELLA BISCUITS

September 26, 2021 Posie Brien

Hi, hey, a note: Thank you for your thoughts on my last post! Haven’t decided for or against the newsletter yet, so for now, we’ll just carry on with some occasional fiction here, and who knows what else, and we’ll see where life takes us…

She feels deflated—and tired of talking—when she walks into the coffee shop on Wednesday morning. The argument last night with her mother sticks to her, and she can’t shake the off-kilter feeling. She and her mother never fight; in their household, it’s her dad whose hot temper sparks the arguments. She and her siblings were always arguing with him in a comfortable, this-is-how-we-love sort of way: One minute they were shouting and slamming doors, and then by dinner time everyone was completely fine. Fights with her dad pass like a quick thunderstorm, the tension dissolving into nothingness, the chaos necessary to clear the air—just like weather.

Eating and adventuring.

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