lysistrategic

Still unsettled from yesterday's conversation with Arthur, Joan turns to what has become one of her more pleasant distractions on the island. Cooking. It should, she supposes as she sorts through the ingredients to see what she can make of them, irritate her to be cooking for not one but two grown adults - one of whom thinks help in the kitchen means kiss the back of her neck until she's too weak in the knees to carry on without a trip to the bedroom, and the other of whom can practically char meat just by looking at it. Yet, it doesn't bother her at all. Instead she finds solace in learning how to combine tropical fruits and spices with whatever meat, fish or fowl the market will supply. It doesn't begin to take the place of the life she misses, but it is something she would have liked to have more time for at home. Ideally. On the bucket list, perhaps, or if she had double the amount of time in a day that she'd had.

Tonight she is making pineapple fried rice with boar sausage and experimenting with shrimp potstickers. The house smells of a papaya-mango reduction and ginger, and she's singing (eighties music always seems to come to mind at times like these; today it's the inexcusably terrible mall music of her teen years) quietly to herself while she stirs basil into her rice.

After the incident with the dinosaurs that Emily identifies as hadrosaurs (territorial herbivores who wanted them away from their water source as Joan had guessed), they take a few minutes to check each other over for injuries. Joan is careful not to know too much field medicine and what she does know, she passes off as a legacy of World Bank training for working in troubled areas. Emily seems to accept it and when they've determined they've suffered no worse than fresh bruises, scrapes, and bumps, they continue moving south, a little slower than before but still with all due speed. Morning is coming quickly and Emily doesn't have to remind her twice that the colder-blooded predators will rise with the sun.

By her best guess, it nears five a.m. when their painful but uneventful hike is interrupted again by the sounds of something moving toward them. This time, there is enough light and enough time to scout for items in her environment to fight with and where to run. Joan picks up a large, heavy branch and says to Emily in a low tone, "No chance you have a tinderbox or cigarette lighter?" Fire is always an advantage, no matter what you're fighting.