Jess and I ate very little before heading to Friday night volleyball at the church. As a result, an hour on the court burned up all my energy, turned me into a mindless zombie behind the net. Jess felt it, too, except whereas mine targeted mainly my central nervous system, her condition hit a little lower, rounding out into monster hunger pains.

With one more game left to be played, Jess and I couldn’t do it. Somehow it seemed an impossible task. So we decided to ditch out a little early, dragging our pathetic selves to the car. Instead of driving directly to urgent care, we stopped at the nearest restaurant.

“Panera closes at nine,” informed the man in the parking lot, who seemed to have materialized out of the thin air. A Panera employee? He lugged an invisible colored garbage bag stuffed with a variety of Panera bread, like he’d just looted the place and was now making his get away. Ruled by our stomachs, we didn’t make much of it and took the man’s word for it. So we turned around and ran through our other options.

We ended up at Max and Erma’s across the way because it was close and they have the best Mexican chicken tortilla soup. Or so we thought.

That night, the service was painfully slow. Our waitress was overwhelmed and apologized  a lot to her tables. (In her defense, I’d say she’d been triple sat - you servers can relate.) An adjacent couple in a booth received their Diet Pepsis but not until after they’d finished their meal. The couple was not happy. Earlier, the woman had ordered the Mexican chicken tortilla soup and promptly sent it back. This should have been our first sign that the chefs in back were having an equally hard time as our server. On its late return, the soup still apparently was short on chicken. Giving up, she managed to digest it as it was.

 Finally, just as we started to get frightened that we’d never see the food we ordered, a never-seen-before server came flying around the corner with our soup and half turkey sandwich. The sandwich looked shirveled and bite-sized. The bottom was soggy and the lettuce purple and wilted. But…it tasted good. The soup, not so much. It had roughly the same color I’d expect pepper spray to have if it came in liquid form - mustard yellow. The tiny bail of tortilla stips on top was just a dot in the middle of the Olympic-size bowl of soup. 

I took a bite. Its temperature was lukewarm, but the spice invaded my throat like I’d just devoured a fistful of nettles. It tasted like…like…formaldehyde, maybe? My throat instantly raw and my insides burning like an active volcano, I grabbed my glass of water and sucked on the straw like there was no tomorrow. Then, I took a frantic mental inventory of our neighboring table’s waters as well as all other potential water sources - the tap at the bar, the Max & Erma’s toliet (the tank water, not the bowl, of course - gosh), the tears streaming down my face - in case our server failed to return in time and I was about to human combust. Thankfully she arrived with a pitcher of water. “Yes, please.”    

“O man!” Jess exclaimed, misty eyed, “this is a spicy batch!”

Suddenly it became clear to us that it wasn’t that the chicken had been left out of the soup, as the woman who’d choked it down before us had suspected, rather it had simply melted to oblivion before it hit the table.

Sweating, Jess managed through more of her soup. When she came back up, her lips were swollen and chapped, like she’d just eaten a very messy tube of red lipstick. My lips and tongue stung dearly, worse than if I’d kissed a colony of red ants. We traded sounds of agony until finally our soups were gone. Oh man did that hurt.

Afterward, my stomach was very upset at me. Once home, I had half a mind to swallow a tray of ice cubes, just for any kind of relief. My tongue and lips stung right up until it was time for bed. And as I lay down to sleep, I wondered, face burning, if all this could have been avoided if only we’d played that last game of volleyball.

Categories: Food, Sports