Every Tuesday night at 8pm Soba attended a Noodles Anonymous meeting, which was, and I’m quoting here directly from their literature: “A place for noodle lovers to lament about not being able to eat as many noodles as they’d like.”

It was at the social hall of a local conservative synagogue, Beth David, led by a sonorous emaciated bearded Rabbi, originally from Toronto, who’d moved to Soba’s city a few years after the Big Noodle, hoping a change in place might do what a change in time had not, deliver him from his ravenous and insatiable appetite for kosher pasta. Sitting at one long table, with the rabbi at its head, were five men and four women, all unrequited lovers of pasta. And there was one twisted tortelli, who’d eaten an entire family of radiatori in the confusing days after the Big Noodle — when half the people in the world turned into noodles — and avoided prison time on some technicality. Overcome by guilt, recurrent thoughts of his glutenny, the tiny squished faces inset into their noodle bodies, rolling around on the floor baffled by the unreality of their condition while he went about calmly simmering a bolognese sauce. He’d once considered himself a good man. That illusion was gone. He refused to eat any pasta after that, and every night he’d find himself dreaming of pasta. He’d wake up distraught and salivating, his stomach burbling for some old dish of steaming spaghetti. He rarely spoke, usually sat there in his chair like a forgotten throw pillow, enduring the frequent glances of the other attendees. Soba, arriving just as the meeting was starting, took an empty seat in the back row next to the tortelli, who was looking a little more frumpled than usual, clearly hadn’t shaved in days, dark green stubble showing. The Rabbi began the session with a prayer and they all closed their eyes and in unison recited: Flying Spaghetti Monster, grant us the serenity to accept the noodles we cannot eat, the courage to eat the noodle substitutes we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen.

Soba grimaced as he said the words noodle substitute. He’d tried them, Soodles. Like eating grass. The rabbi asked if anyone wanted to speak and a woman raised her hand and stood up. She gave the usual speech about how much she hates all noodle people even though she shouldn’t really. But it’s total bullshit, she said, how I can’t eat any noodles just because they get all upset by it. It’s not like I’m eating them, she said, and at least three people in the room (though to his credit not the Rabbi) turned and looked at the tortelli, who sank even lower in his chair, a thin wheezing sound as he deflated, faint smell of dough.