The food started to embarrass her. "Oh!" the shrimp tempura seemed to think, porn-ily. "Look at who's come to deep fry us again!" But she had to keep playing a little while longer — Cooking Mama was her only real outlet in those days.

Despite what you've heard, it wasn’t sexual. After much futile searching for the ideal art form, she'd found that food was undisputedly the best vehicle of expression. Can words drip sweetness? No, that's for strawberries. Have you ever met a dancer as flexible as a mozzarella stick? She didn't think so. Paint is nice, if you're coming out of the "primitivism" exhibit, and you want to be reminded that horses can also come in yellow shades of Kandinsky. Then, opera is good if you want to inform a theater that you think those Kandinsky horses are fucking ugly, but you've left your microphone behind, with the Ritz crackers collecting under your duvet. 

Which brings us back to food. Since Fall Out Boy singles evaded her, she'd learned to find community in the Ritz crackers collecting like meteor dust around her pillow. She imagined that, in dinosaur times, Ritz crackers were as big as asteroids and had armored tails. That's what she would have been like, and then she would have martyred herself in the subglacial water. 

But she couldn't stop thinking about Pleistocene megafauna. She still can't. Unlike her sexuality, the last ice age was comprehensible, and it didn't need a body. If you were a woolly mammoth grazing on narrow-leafed campion in the Arctic, you wouldn't rush, because no mother was coming to break down your door. And if a mother did come, it would be as an archeologist on an expedition trip. She'd at least make you feel safe. Say you got encased in permafrost. Her ice pick would avoid the heft of your skin, and your coarse hair, able to withstand 30,000 years of freeze, would absorb all your important secrets. No one could guess who you were under the wool just by looking. That's why guys grow beards. 

And that’s why she got her Nintendo DS. Have you heard of it? It's kind of new. Hers is gray like a pre-human oyster, and sometimes she'd draw pictures of a Homotherium smoking shisha in PictoChat. That's her favorite scimitar-toothed cat, by the way — it looks like her car, but with better back muscles. 

Before her DS, the Ritz crumbs were her only company at night. There were a lot of crumbs, because reading National Geographic in bed activated her desire, and she exercised it by munching on crackers. She'd ask the crumbs for advice, like should she read the rock Wikipedia or the tree Wikipedia? They'd respond to her girlish musings by beaming a millennia of salt to her taste buds: ancient, square, slipping on the tongue. Angles, they'd remind her. Confined, contained. Safe. 

So when she saw the compact Nintendo DS in the GameStop window, she knew she had to have it. 

The only game she bought for DS was Cooking Mama, because GameStop had added it onto her purchase in a bundle deal. She hesitated at the counter, at first, because she wasn't sure that she'd like the cooking game. Then she handed the boy her tutoring money. She'd suspected that she'd always enjoyed food more than the average person — while everyone at school was happy to coat their tenders in watery ketchup from the cafeteria, she preferred to make a sort of pioneer's aioli from the mayo and a squeeze of lemon she'd brought in plastic wrap. She supposes she identified nobility in the indulgence, a small way to revere her biological needs. Today, she infuses her water bottles with all kinds of herbs and fruit — mint, basil, lime — out of respect for her evolutionary thirst, and for the microscopic shrimp in the tap. But she didn’t think about her food fixation much last year, she just yearned for flavor.

While she watched Animal Planet commercials and dreamt of the New York mastodon's enviably square bone structure, she’d shove Cool Ranch Doritos into her mouth and pretend they were ossified. When she ran out of chips, she pretended that she was ossified, fossilized in jungle dung. It’s not as depressing as it sounds. Once, a giant ground sloth took a boulder-sized shit, and now it gets to live on the Upper West Side, in the Museum of Natural History. She wouldn’t mind that sort of upgrade, she thought. She'd have a shorter commute to school.

She didn't like taking the subway. Her heart races around strangers, especially when they smell or are bleeding, and Cooking Mama soon became an effective coping mechanism for city life stress. Unlike public transportation, Mama let her explore the world within reason. Before that, she didn't know what to make of her dreams about salt and spice. Later, she found it in the safe confines of Mama's serving platter. Like extinction, to her, Cooking Mama felt inevitable. It was determined by facts, not the cloudy unknown. If Mama were disappointed, it was only because the player deserved it; she'd taken too long to slice the marbled beef.

But that rarely happened. She reached for her DS like a worn sweatshirt, to comfort her, and she quickly became the Iron Chef of Cooking Mama. All she needed to do was wiggle the stylus back and forth, back and forth, like an elephant tail.

With this magic pen, she could create any dish she unlocked from the game's library, including "Hamburger with Egg," "Japanese Steak," and "Seafood Spaghetti." She could slice onions without crying and pack perfect snowballs of rice. She doesn't know how to make rice in real life, and she gets shy about it around her mama. She eats with her hands, like you're supposed to. But, when grains would stick to her fingers in a clump of masala, she'd feel like she hadn't done enough to earn their loyalty. On her DS, though, rice existed beyond touch. She could create it from nothing, from her game history, and it had no loyalty to time. Cooking Mama suspended the Cenozoic era into an indefinite dinner.

But she stopped playing Mama shortly after she unlocked the "Seasoned Beef with Potatoes" level. 

She thought she'd had it all figured out. She'd learned to saw sausages apart efficiently, like their slivers could feed starving pilgrims. She wrapped gyoza into blades then dipped them into suntanned oil, and Cooking Mama looked so proud of her. She stayed up late and simmered in her own primordial soup. Until one day. In the white transition screens between foaming butter and sautéeing chicken, she noticed the matte reflection of her face. Her eyes looked too sharp, and too focused on creating. Well, she didn't think that was appropriate for a clay human to focus on. We’re for molding, not for making.