Read: Camilla Grudova’s Gluttonous Short Story, Glamour Dish

Exploring ideas of containment and indulgence, Glamour Dish is a short story about a PhD scholar who brings their old professor food in prison

Strange Masculinity: Read five original short stories by Fitzcarraldo Edition authors, published in collaboration with the press for Another Man's Winter/Spring 2026 issue.

Since my old professor, Radloff, had been in prison, I tried to bring him meals every few days at the least, during prison visiting hours, when he leaned with his face against the walls of his cell like a snail and smiled weakly at me. He was not allowed to speak. The prison did not provide food for inmates, only water from a small sink in each cell, to be gathered in a bowl which also must be used as a cup. A week after he was arrested and trialled, I received a letter that I had been named as his food provider. It outlined a simple rule: all food prisoners eat must be provided by friends and relatives. Those who are not brought food starve to death, and their bodies are donated to the science department of the university, the university the professor used to work at. I am the only one to bring the professor food as no one else communicated with him anymore. I had been his laboratory research assistant at the university, and they implicated me enough in his crimes through association, the premise I must have known something, to force me to leave the university but not enough for me to be arrested too. My career was ruined, I lost my scholarship and I had to work two jobs at a restaurant and at an underground metro WC which cost one small coin to use. I easily got the jobs I was physically fit and unobtrusive, though they both recommended I remove the earring I could wear freely as a student with substantial funding. It was jangly and gold, a replica of one found at an ancient burial site. They also told me to cut my hair and beard both of which I wore long in a typical PhD student fashion. I had known nothing of the professor’s personal life, I assumed he didn’t have one as he wore maroon turtlenecks covered in a light layer of sand, had an odd dent in his head and a little ponytail which curled like an overgrown fingernail. His trousers were always pulled up high enough to encompass his stomach bulge and rounded off with a beaded belt. The sand was owing, not just to our archaeological specimens in the laboratory but to his lizards and hermit crabs, which I looked after whenever he was away. The lizards and crabs ate fruit. When I looked after them, the professor would leave a large fruit basket on the table, wrapped in coloured cellophane as if a gift, which I had to chop into small pieces and put into the aquariums – enormous green apples, mangos, kiwis, grapes, melon. I examined the label the first time the basket was from a fancy department store known for its hampers. I was peckish once, but I couldn’t find anything to eat in the cupboards. There was basmati rice, millet, oats, cumin, nigella seeds, gravy granules, flour, bicarbonate of soda, but nothing to snack on. Some of the lizards resembled medieval or ancient Egyptian booties, others garish spectacle cases. The crabs, the professor once explained, were not the makers of their own shells, but scavenged them, which was why each looked so different. One, he pointed out, was not homed in a shell at all, but an inner part from a disassembled coffee maker.

Though the prisoners weren’t allowed to speak, they could give us lists of food and other requests. I was given one weekly, written by the professor, from a guard. There was nothing in his notes expressing concern for his lizards and crabs, or regret at the crime he had committed and his aborted archaeological research, just a list of desired combustibles as if all life before was forgotten. ‘Raisins’, ‘tonic water’, ‘pre-cooked rice’ . I would bring what I could and he would have to accept it.

Often, it was leftovers from the restaurants or items from the metro vending machines between my work and the prison: Vending machines containing sunflower seeds, individual bananas wrapped in Styrofoam so they wouldn’t bruise, cans of cold black tea and salty mineral water, hot noodles and hot coffee in small white cups, seafood, peanuts, boiled eggs, popcorn, jelly, umbrellas and toys. From one, I bought a tin of salted whale meat. The tins in the machine were expired no one had serviced the machine in a long time, and some of the tins had burst and had long grey extremities hanging from them, but the basic mechanisms of the machine still worked and it swallowed money and dispensed items. I doubted anyone came to pick up the money, I noted that if I became financially desperate I could smash it open. The tin was pink with an illustration of a whale in the sea circled by tiny boats in the shape of a heart. Of course, Radloff didn’t have a tin opener, and I couldn’t bring any utensils into the prison they could be used to escape, he would perhaps be able to push and twist the whole prison with the aid of a tin opener.

The question the prison forced on us was how could someone who did something so horrible still have an appetite? I saw the other visitors waiting with their food a woman who always brought a decorated cake in the shape of a little girl in a textured, creamy dress, packages of instant noodles though the inmates didn’t have kettles they would have to soak the noodles cold for a long time, sausages wrapped in brown paper which the guards unwrapped and smelled, pineapples, boxes of violet and rose creams, dried fish, jarred spread, bags and bags of sunflower seeds as chewing and spitting them out was not just a food but an activity, once raw green potatoes and a single leather shoe, big bottles of weak beer, sliced bread, castor oil and dried figs. I saw an inmate cleaning the sink of his cell using slices of white bread which he then ate.

During my interrogation with the authorities, I told them about the lizards and crabs and how they needed to be fed. They did not care at all, they were more interested in the fact I picked up his mail from the floor underneath the mail slot and put it on the kitchen table – had I noticed any personal letters from a woman? I went myself to Radloff’s old building and got in by buzzing a random apartment. There was an authority notice on the professor’s door to not enter, and a chain across it. On the door mat was a rotting basket of fruit, surrounded by fruit flies, left by delivery. I tried to kick open the door, I pounded on it and shouted Hello. Perhaps the lizards had found a way out of their aquariums and munched on the cacti, but the hermit crabs would surely eat each other or retreat into their shells until they disappeared. The next day at the prison, the tin of whale meat was lying on the floor of Radloff’s cell, warped from being thrown against the wall many times. He would be hungry, and therefore would eat what I brought him the next time regardless of what it was.

All the prisoners were employed in an onsite factory. They made envelopes, notebooks, other stationery, and simple clothes cheap, neutral coloured suits sold in square plastic boxes. A woman in the prison shop picked up item after item, inspecting them, perhaps hoping for something made by a particular man inside and perhaps containing hidden messages. We got coupons for the shop from bringing food, I suppose because we kept the prisons running by keeping inmates alive. I bought a suit for my shifts at the restaurant as they had complained about my clothes. The paper in the notebooks was the same off-grey brown as the toilet paper I had to give out at the metro bathroom, a pyramid of it beside me and the cash box on a little desk, which underneath was a bucket full of cleaning supplies (broom, sponge, a bottle of pink spray). We didn’t keep it in the stalls as too many men stuffed the toilet with so much paper it clogged, or they filled their pockets with it to take home. Some men were embarrassed and did not ask for any toilet paper, pretended they were only urinating and carefully walked when they left, as if trying to avoid contact between their soiled bottoms and their clothes.

After the restaurant, I had an overnight shift in the bathroom and brought a bag of leftovers with me, which I would drop by the prison on my way home in the morning. One of the administrators from the university who forced me to leave, came to the bathroom that night and asked for four sheets. He did not recognize me, as I no longer had the shaggy look typical of the university’s students. The bathroom had its own vending machine, selling pills, condoms, tiny bottles of unpleasant cologne. He bought one of each which I promised myself to remember.

The restaurant where I worked had hamburger steak, prawn or tomato spaghetti, pizza, coffee or lemon jelly with cream, mussels and breaded cutlets. I had a leftover pizza and coffee jelly for myself, and for Radloff, a plateau de fruits de mer.

It came frozen, in large flat packs, labelled Glamour Dish, and we resold it as plateau de fruits de mer. It consisted of a plastic silver dish with oysters, a small lobster, cockles, mussels, prawns, a few octopus tenacles, crab claws, an inedible starfish and large decorative fake pearls, a container of pinkish sauce to dip everything in.

It was brought to every table and we had to say ‘you ordered this, sir?’ They hadn’t, no one ever did because of its extortionate price, occasionally the table was embarrassed into saying ‘yes’ and this brought in a good profit. One was dethawed per night, and brought to every table, it was spongy to the touch and started to smell half way through the evening we put salt and lemon juice on it – and sometimes a squirt of perfume too. No one had fallen for the trick that night. I wrapped it in two plastic bags so it wouldn’t leak.

When the metro bathroom was empty, near dawn, I took the lobster from the dish, dropped it in one of the toilets and took it out again. It left an oily residue in the toilet bowl water. The prison suit, which I had worn for the first time that night, had already worn down into small holes under the armpits and around the crotch, where I had sweated with exertion. My restaurant manager had yelled at me and told me to get a better suit. I reassembled the plateau de fruits de mer in the prison before presenting it. I did not return for a few days, but curiosity got the better of me, I wanted to see the results. The university possibly wouldn’t take his body, if I, innocent, was considered an upsetting presence by association, some students might object to performing a research autopsy knowing what Radloff did, to have to examine his member and his mouth and hands.

There was no diarrhea and vomit splattered all over the walls and on the prison bars separating me from Radloff. He was asleep, very soundly, and held an uneaten crab claw to his chest. The empty dish sat glistening, as if freshly cleaned, above the sink, to be used as a mirror.

This story is taken from the Winter/Spring 2026 issue of Another Man, which avaiable now.