“Was it good?” I asked.
“It’s incredible,” she answered honestly, despite her anger, which made me laugh again.
I took some pasta for myself and ate a big forkful with plenty of sauce. The sharp spice and scent were ameliorated by the acidity and sweetness of the tomatoes. All together, it brought a new depth of flavor to the light taste of the canned mackerel. The pasta in this world tasted strongly of flour and wheat, so I wasn’t a huge fan, but in this case it went perfectly with the sauce. The more I put in my mouth, the richer the flavor became.
We ate, utterly focused on the pasta. To think that dinner could taste so good even with the world in ruins, sitting in a pitch-black and deserted town, our car having plunged into a hole next to us. It was such a simple truth, but I only realized it there in that moment.
Even when we’d finished, we hadn’t had quite enough. Nito was looking longingly at the pan, and there was still sauce inside it. I stood up and put my shoes back on, going over to the back seat of the Kettle. I searched through the cans and eventually found what I was looking for. When Nito saw the cans I’d brought back, her face brightened.
After lighting the Svea again and putting the sauce on to warm, I opened the smallish, rectangular can I’d just brought over. The food inside had a rather strong scent that prickled at my nose, and a deep yellow color—it was cheese. I put it on the chopping board and used a knife to cut it in half. The one piece went into the pan, and as I stirred it through with the spatula, it started to melt into strings.
Next, I opened a cylindrical can and took out what was practically a log of bread. I divvied it up into four pieces and cut about halfway through each piece before cutting up the cheese that was left and putting a bit of it inside each piece of bread, making tiny sandwiches. I took the pan off the heat and used the Svea directly on one sandwich. It would start to burn fairly quickly, so I went in bursts, moving the bread toward the heat and quickly away again. As I did, the bread gradually heated up.
Once both sides had browned, I opened it up and saw that the cheese had started to melt and spread across the warm and fluffy bed of bread around it. A skin had formed on its surface, and when I poked at it molten cheese gushed forth like magma. I used a fork to scoop up the tomato and cheese sauce with shreds of mackerel and slathered that generously onto the bread. I offered the sandwich to Nito and she took it with sparkling eyes. Even as I moved to start on my own portion, Nito just stayed there, holding it in both hands, waiting.
“You can start,” I told her.
“No... I’ll wait,” she said, biting at her lip to hold back.
By the time I’d finally finished making mine, I was worried she might just start drooling. As I bit into my own sandwich, Nito opened her small mouth as wide as she could. The crunches of us each taking a bite merged into one. Our gasps of surprise, the exhalations out of our noses, and even our sighs of contentment were all in sync as well.
Ah, cheese. The big cheese had arrived. What a thing—cheese the almighty.
I nodded contentedly several times. The canned cheese was a priceless treasure, rarely seen. Maybe they just hadn’t made much of it, but either way I was sure everyone would have used up what they had before long.
When we’d had the sauce with pasta, the tomatoes’ invigorating acidity and sweetness had enveloped everything. Now, the cheese brought all the elements together and gave the dish a strong savory flavor. It was rich even in texture and went utterly perfectly with the bread. The only other ingredients were tomato and shreds of mackerel, and those were leftovers at that. There wouldn’t have been enough for a full hamburger or sandwich with just the leftover sauce, but melting in the cheese had stretched it to a full-fledged meal. The combination of the sauce dollops and the crispness of the bread was to die for.
I took a glance at Nito to see her small frame swaying from side to side. Her eyes were screwed shut and there was a grin on her lips. Just seeing her expression was making me happy as well.
Oh, so that’s what it is, I realized. This is happiness.
It was such a simple thing. I was full of emotion, and yet all we were doing was eating delicious food. Could I even call that happiness? Was it even right to feel happiness in this world, what with the fact it was in ruins and scores upon scores of people had just vanished into nothing?
As I watched Nito munching cheerfully away at her sandwich, though, those worries floated away. The moon had appeared in the sky at some point, along with the stars, and it felt almost like the sky here was the same as the one from my world. The town was pitch-black, the Kettle had fallen into a hole, and the auto-trike was no longer connected to it. These were irreversible failures, but perhaps you could indeed just call them surprises. If we hadn’t hit that hole, we wouldn’t have had this meal here.
“Nito,” I called.
She looked up at me with utter innocence, her cheeks still stuffed and a smudge of sauce at the edge of her mouth. Her rounded cheeks reflected the flickering flame from the Svea. She tilted her head in question, and I suddenly became all embarrassed and shook my head.
“Nah, never mind.”
I didn’t yet have the courage to honestly tell her “thank you.”