literature

Jordy Spyt: Recipe Antidotum

Eighteen young Flemish and Dutch authors have taken inspiration from seventeenth-century artefacts from the Rijksmuseum. Looking at these objects, what eureka moments do they see? Jordy Spyt chose a passglass – a glass used for drinking games – and wrote an antidote to toxic masculinity. ‘Double chins win the war’

Recipe Antidotum

Equipment: 1 litre alcohol, 1 mortar, 1 wet tea towel, 1 dry tea towel and 1 perfume bottle.

Pass one: Maybe they’ve just been promoted, or their wife hasn’t yet discovered their affair. Everything is a reason for taking out the passglass. After a bitter gulp they carefully check the glasses. If the beer isn’t exactly at the first mark, they have to take another sip.

Step 1: Put a wet tea towel in a warm place. The following morning, fold the tea towel and stomp to death the cockroaches inside.

Pass two: After missing this mark, the glass must be fully drained. Their tongues will loosen, they’ll start talking about the government of the republic, the latest gossip from the salons, their companies overseas, how they put their wives in their place and how much they love one another – as friends.

Step 2: Place the cockroaches in a mortar and grind them into a fine paste. Transfer to a pot of water and bring to the boil.

Pass three: Nobody knows what’s going on inside their minds, walls within wood-patterned walls close in on them and heat up the room. If they fail to reach this mark, they have to rip one another’s clothes off.

Step 3: Add alcohol.

Pass four: When missing this mark, they have to display their genitals on the table. It looks like a butcher’s counter. They insert their piece of meat into their glass and count the passes. “Pass, pass, pass!” they shout out as they grow hard and come.

Step 4: Strain the pulp through a dry tea towel and catch the liquid in a perfume bottle.

Pass five: Double chins win the war. Their faces turn purple, all their blood is pumped to their dicks. They grow and grow until the passglasses burst and smash to smithereens. Fault lines spread from their crotch and tear their bodies apart. Chunks of flesh and body parts fall to the ground after which the meat melds into one.

Step 5: Find the amalgam’s habitat.

Pass six: A stranger enters the room, all eyes of the amalgam fixed on her. With a perfume bottle in her hand and her eyes closed, she walks into the mass of flesh. She is absorbed by it.

Step 6: Open the bottle and spray.

Pass seven: They don’t remember the stranger. Maybe she’d been their mistress, or they once cheated her of a dance by sweet-talking in her ear, rubbing themselves against her legs and getting under her skin. For a split second, the amalgam feels something, an inner warmth. Walls within wood-patterned walls besmirched with their entrails. It rains flesh, the blood drips and the stranger is left alone.

Step 7: Remove all entrails from your hair, take a deep breath. Repeat if necessary.

• deBuren
• Jordy Spyt
• Rijksmuseum