Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales by Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt Page B

right out.” Shesauntered back to the kitchen.
    I took a table near the counter, and like all the other tables, it held a glass bottle of hot sauce, a squeeze bottle of sweeter barbecue sauce, a cage of sugar packets in case your tea wasn’t sweet enough (hard to imagine), and a roll of paper towels in lieu of napkins, the latter an innovation I considered suggesting to the owner of my restaurant back home, beforeI remembered he’d fired me. It seems unfair to get fired for something you did when you were so drunk you barely remember it, but that’s life.
    I pulled out my phone—I’d finally turned off the keyword alert that told me every time my name was mentioned online, but I still occasionally, morbidly, checked the social media sites to see what people were saying about me—but there was no signal. I didn’thave time to be annoyed before the waitress was back with a red plastic oval tray that held a heaping scoop of barbecue (“pulled pork” as the rest of the world calls it), a white bread roll, and a wax-paper-lined basket of hush puppies.
    The food was … well, I’m a cook, not a food writer, but it was like eating my own childhood memories. The barbecue was cooked to perfection, seasoned just right,spicy and vinegar-astringent sauce combining ideally with the meltingly delicious fat in the pork. The hush puppies were perfect, too: oblongs of deep-fried cornbread, just a little crunchy on the outside, sweet and fluffy inside. The tea was sweet enough to make me want to schedule a cleaning at the dentist, but even that tasted like home.
    I ate with single-minded intensity, then leaned backin my chair and belched quietly to myself. The waitress squinted at me from the cash register. “You look real familiar to me,” she said. “You always had blond hair?”
    “Oh. No, but if you recognize me it’s probably because—I’ve been on TV lately. That reality cooking show,
Stand the Heat
.”
    She did not seem awed by my fleeting celebrity. She frowned, and I revised my estimate of her age from thirtiesto forties. “Had to cancel the cable a while back,” she said. “Never seen it. Did you win?”
    I shook my head. “Came in fourth. Got cut right before the finale. That episode just aired last week.” I think I kept all the bitterness out of my voice. There were three finalists. Even the two who didn’t win would get perks: money, bragging rights, invites back for a future all-star show. They were goodchefs, and one of them had even been a friend—a summer-camp kind of friend, though, and we hadn’t kept in touch since we stopped living in the same New York town house—but I didn’t believe any of them were better than me. I’d been a front-runner, and I knew it, winning lots of the weekly competitions … but one fish bone in one fillet served to one flamboyantly vicious guest judge had ended myrun.
    “Too bad,” she said. “Still, fourth place ain’t bad. I never came in fourth place at anything. Maybe I saw you in a magazine or something, though I swear … Huh. I’ve always wondered about those shows—is it all real, or is it fake, like pro wrestling?”
    I hesitated, unsure how to answer the question, even though I’d been asked its equivalent many times. “It’s … the contests are real, thegames and competitions, though they cut out a lot of the boring stuff to make it seem more fast-paced and exciting. But when you watch the shows, the stuff you see people say, a lot of that’s
encouraged
, if not exactly scripted. And … ” I tried to think of a way to say what I meant. “The me on-screen isn’t the real me. I don’t think I’m that cocky, for one thing, and they really tried to playup the fact that I come from the South—I swear they showed every time I said ‘y’all,’ four or five times at least. The producers turn you into a character.”
    In fact, the bizarre falseness of reality TV had knocked me off balance in my own life, causing me to question all sorts of