It was going to be a good lunch. She was a confident and creative cook with acute senses enough to find the exquisite and delicate balance of flavours and textures to make secretly sophisticated meals on the meagre budget they were on. It was cold in the kitchen, no heating in the damp winter, but the sorry, dusty, dry herbs preserved from the sunshine of hot late-spring noons faintly mixed their fragrances with each other hanging in front of the sweaty condensation of the battered window. The cold fluorescent light blinked, the sickly-yellow was dimmer.
She hang on to the thought of her treasures in a row as if a neclace. Spiky-leafed rosemary with memories from adventurous times. Chocolate mint that smelled like After Eight only to a few. Soft curry that did not at all resemble the curry the spice. Pizza thyme embracing all the sweetness of Italian flavours. There was no basil because the kids chuffed that in straight from the plant as if it was cotton candy and the plant itself never survived. Pineapple sage with ridiculously daring red flowers reminding her of horny big purple penises, softly bending under the white weight of the sky’s ass. Peppermint that she never really wanted to use dried but others accepted it as herbal tea sometimes. Wall. Cold. Damp.
She wasn’t going to try to use her favourite sharp big knife, because she broke it just recently. A smaller one will have to do, and ungraceful cutting-experiment will take place with inadequate tools. She always felt she had to hide these moments of her life. She will be leaning over the meat as her mother, with an unhealthy bent back, fat forearms on a fit body, hair in the face, shaking as her strength wasn’t enough to push the blunt knife through the raw meat.
Right, but first, the oil in the pan, the pan with the sweet black intestines that heated so evenly and never stuck until she ruined it with use. A wide, shallow pan at that, with a dirty bottom. That blue, burnt circle brought France in the kitchen as it was hanging from the wall alongside clean pots and never used, pale, frigid, sticking, eco-friendly pans. She reached for France, for her favourite color, blue, for non-stickiness, for temperatures and sounds that they shared over the years. The handle was screwed on securely, never needing fixing.
The stove was out-worldly. The first time she saw a cooker like that was in a science-fiction movie and they covered it pretending it was a futuristic cooking tool. As for her, they could have left it. The claw-like upper insert for the control knobs made her reach over steam and spitting oil when she needed to lower the heat. The snail-like twisted iron rods heated up to bright redness that frightened her deeply having always been painfully aware of inhuman heat. The surface wasn’t flat or well-sized enough to cook safely. She chucked France on top of the snail to cover it completely and tried hard to forget about the fact that the pan overhang and it wasn’t recommended usage.
She should never have read the instruction manual and it was very well worth to tear apart in a momentary burst of blind anger. Ha! She won.
She turned on the cooktop carefully. The bravery of her action made her a hero every day, because besides the position of the knobs, the red-heat and the breached recommendations all the marks of the cooker disappeared and she could only rely on her memory to turn on the right heating element out of the four. Her memory as well as her casual lapse of attention made her actions unreliable enough for her to never be sure if the right cooker was on. From now on she would be looking or listening every thirty seconds after a fraction of second of panic remembering the chance that a naked coil was shining bright red light on the old torn wallpaper.
It was time to pick a smaller onion with comfortingly dry skin that paints eggs for Easter, dies hair and works for colds. Lovely, transparent, rusty brown, crumbling leaves stretching the kitchen bench into large, superhuman onion fields that her grandparents cutivated, standing barefeet on the cold, brown ground, little hairs lifted on her grandmothers head from the light wind in the morning, waving to her. Onion.
Now the knife, but really, which one would still work if not the big one with the black, heavy plastic handle. Her grandmother’s old, crescent moon-shaped little sharp knife was on the other end of the world. Ah, and she just remembered, before opening the yellow, solid wood drawer for the knife that she will actually have to wash off the dried blood off the blade. What a bummer, the oil is heating already. Hopefully. Yes, she’s turned on the right knob.
Anyway, she strictly kept everything out from the kitchen sink, so there will be no practical problems in washing the knife only she didn’t want to face all that blood. The sink was a single one for these weird people washing their dishes in a sinkful of warm water and drying them without rinsing them. She, if anyone, knew the terrible statistics of IBS. What did they think was the reason if licking off the left-over soap with left-over dirt that covered their dishes?! A single sink and separate taps, so really, if you wanted a glass of water, you had to keep the dirty dishes on the bench and she did. Good mother. Good wife. Good household manager. Well done. She’ll just deal with the knife now.
As she opened the drawer, showing wood at the chipped places, the knob slippery wet and shiny in the flickering light, she felt nausea but she knew that she was brave and she was going to deal with this. Too.
The she startled. There was a knife in the drawer where she put it, sharp, big, with a black plastic handle, knocks and scratches at the right places, but it was wrong. The familiar spikes of the broken edge, the droplets of blood splattered on it after she massacred her family, the disjointed and lost sharp top half of the knife, the red and brown smears in the drawer as she remembered happened when putting the knife back, they weren’t there. She saw an intact knife, inertly laying in line with everything else, noncommittally spotless, absurdly fitting in in its environment but physically incorrect or even impossible. She, as an automaton grabbed the handle and dropped the knife in the sink still regretting she was going to smear the blood on the old stainless steel surface. Apparently she didn’t.
Then she realised that by the knife there was the sink-hole, that suddenly expanded in diameter, as she saw her fish being sucked into it. The fish wasn’t a tropical decorative fish. The fish was Dr Pig, the dotted balloon molly gentleman, who patiently put up with the skinny and pompous and skinny molly boys trying to take the spots off his impeccable tuxedo. Dr Pig had a wife, Mrs Pig and she had dots on her red frock. There was always a high-end ball for the ones who wished to be entertained in her living room. Of course, until Mr Pig, just yesterday, made her realise she was a monster. Not that it was new, she WAS a monster, but it was a new light on her real personality. She bought people (fish) on money. She donated her husband’s earnings on slavery. She put tropical fish into an unheated fishtank to suffer. She mercilessly watched every second of their lives through cold glass. She didn’t want to be this person. Just yesterday she realised she was a monster and she didn’t want to be one. She was kind and good willing and empathetic with a big heart and she still tortured living beings. To save Mr Pig from herself, she reached into the fishtank, grabbed the gentleman from next to his wife, dressed for the night in black-and-white suit, run to the kitchen, opened the coldwater tap freezing in the winter and drained the confused doctor, who she felt compassion and love for, down the black, dirty sinkhole, to cross old sticky foodscraps and pieces of hair, suffocate through walls and ground and die before arriving to the worst part of the sewage system. She closed her eyes now because the darkness of the outside was deeper than the one inside her head and she remembered compassionately suffocating with the poor, observed, purchased and tortured fish, who was cold all the time without a hope of warmth. She remembered how she pictured herself being sucked in the black gaping emptiness still alive, knowing she will die. She remembered screaming and being alone and the helplessness despite of the fact she was neutrally observed. She didn’t remember the pain though. Mr Pig bravely had to endure that alone to stop what future was going to bring.
She breathed in. She hated breathing but she couldn’t stop it. The cold air rushing in didn’t resonate with screams, nor was it gusty from the centrifugal motion of approaching the sterile sink through vast expanses of the insides of a brightly glittering but scratched stainless steel cube. She opened her eyes.
Quiet. Herbs. Condensation. Oil softly sizzling for dinner. An onion. Clean kitchen bench. Physically impossible. She was watching the old photograph, the digital animation, the ghostly image of the flickering kitchen. She has read this book before, there is a family quietly sleeping in the bedrooms, a detailed cooktop manual in the cupboard and the fish tank full of fresh plants and healthy fish in this chapter. She remembered the words only she couldn’t remember the author. That’s okay though, she thought, I can read this book again if I want to, I don’t need to remember everything. I don’t need to remember what’s for lunch. This is not my life. I am still tired from being up half the night sticking knives into my poor, tortured children to help them stop breathing to save them from a mother who never smiles.