A Single Eye by Susan Dunlap Page A

breathed in the wonderful aroma of dark winy chocolate.
    â€œOh my God, I must’ve died and gone to Hershey.”
    â€œHardly,” Barry muttered contemptuously. “I do not create milk chocolate.”
    I, who owed many happy moments to Hershey’s with Almonds, was silenced.
    â€œStandard American chocolate!” he huffed, as he poured the beans out onto the table. “These are criollos , the most prized cacao beans in the world. What I create will be seventy-two percent cacao.”
    Sounded good to me. Any percent chocolate was more percent than the usual sesshin fare. Surely he wouldn’t be shipping off for sale all of that fine chocolate. Surely there would be the occasional short-weighted bar, the tainted truffle. While he made the roshi’s cocoa, I leaned back against a counter and took in this decidedly unusual kitchen, really two kitchens in one. Not exactly before-and-after. More like for-richer-for-poorer. Here in the richer half the windows were high up and even with white walls there was something dark and cozy about this room with the giant man and his hulking, old-fashioned machines. I could just imagine hauling them out here nine miles on the rutted road from the highway!
    And when I took a sip of the half-cup he offered me, I just sighed. It was like Irish coffee but a million times better—thick, dark, with a touch of sweetness, a bit of liquor flavor.
    â€œOh, I really have gone to heaven. Barry, can I just stay in here for the whole sesshin? I’ll cart you up and down the hill.”
    He turned to me and smiled as if I’d cooed over his first-born. “I make it special for Roshi. And that cocoa is from the old powder, only half Criollo beans. But this new batch—”
    â€œBy which, he means, don’t figure you’re going to get another cup,” Maureen commented from her end of the kitchen. “The rest of us get cocoa very occasionally, as a great treat, but not the roshi’s special cocoa. So enjoy.”
    Zen teaches us to be in the moment and a moment of the Roshi’s Special Reserve cocoa was just the one to be with. I stepped outside and sat on a bench between the kitchen doors and looked over my steaming cup at the people strolling across the knoll and at the great trees beyond. It says something about the illusory nature of fear that the forest didn’t seem so bad now that I had a cup of cocoa in hand. But sitting here wasn’t walking into the woods. I had arranged my life so that the possibility didn’t arise.
    I sipped slowly, trying to focus entirely on the taste. But the woods teased and jeered. I’d survived the ride in the open bed of the pickup; maybe this was the time I’d get over my childish fear. Slowly I raised my eyes and stared at the line of trees at the far side of the quad a quarter mile away. No reaction! I took a long relieved swallow, finished the cup, and with bravado turned to the trees just beyond the kitchen. My stomach lurched, my gaze went blurry. The cocoa cup jolted and I had to grab to keep from dropping it.
    â€œ. . . way to the cabins?”
    I breathed in thickly, slowly, so the movement took all my attention.
    â€œAre you okay?”
    â€œOh, sorry,” I said, in a voice that couldn’t have sounded as constricted to her as it did to me. “Maureen?”
    The blond woman from the kitchen nodded. “I wanted to make sure you knew the way to the cabins.”
    â€œI was just . . . Thanks, yes, it’d be great if you pointed me there. Let me take my cup into the kitchen,” I said, grabbing for time to pull myself together.
    When I came back outside, with the roshi’s thermos in hand, Maureen was shifting her wraith-like body from one long thin leg to the other. She was as dissimilar to bear-like Barry as two people could be. Like a young gazelle’s, her feet seemed to hit the ground solely so she could spring off. As soon as we were clear of