It’s acceptable when you ask for it with a burger. It becomes part of someone’s job to
ask you, part of your role to answer, to smile.
I’m smiling now, but in a way which is not conventional or
asked for. I’m in the house alone with the heating turned off, and the cold is starting
to crawl over the surfaces. I feel it on the chopping board before I feel the
marble itself. Smiling, finding it amusing almost, that the most expensive
surface in our house is typically stained by
the juices of mangled fruit and vegetables.
An onion cuts clean though, only perhaps with the slight
fizz of regret. Almost like an annoyance. I still smile.
I feel a kind of confirmation that I can mould the onion,
like a long-misted lightbulb locked in a brown paper, to a mass of silver-hued
rings. I can imagine them clattering but without sound. They wrap around only
each other. The knife is blunt (the knives were are always blunt, over-worked, gored
for their purpose) and starts to snag on the flesh, like protest. I have
already unhooked the brown skin, as if completing a ritual undressing. Like a
person rolls their sleeve up for the needle, and the sleeve is both inconsequential
and immaterial.
Close your eyes. Sometimes I play this game with myself.
Scissoring the knife through the flesh of an onion without looking. Sometimes it is the thrill which
makes the day. And if I slip, ah, sending this blundering metal through skin
and mingling with blood, this makes me ‘mad’. If I complete the ring I am
‘normal’, I am ‘cooking’, I am ‘enjoying myself’.
Strange, how definitions change when cutting an onion.
Occasionally the rings seem to roll a kind of acridity which
occupies the corner of my eyes like small weight. It is acceptable to cry
whilst cutting onions, though not acceptable to cry when cutting apples. Not
acceptable to stand with a knife cutting an apple crying even though you know
cutting the apple is why you are crying, seeing a pattern of beauty slit
through, and not feeling hungry and only wanting to feel occupied, occupied,
occupied. People don’t tend to trust crying with a knife, except onions.
Strange how the word ‘except’ is like ‘accept’, isn’t it,
yet so different. Sticking like onion-skin in my gullet.
I scrape the rings into a cereal bowl. If I fry them this makes me ‘conventional’,
if I fry them and press my hand in the hot oil and wait for sensation this
makes me ‘mad’. But I feel no heat and
do neither. I cross to the fridge and take out plastic bottle of tomato ketchup.
It allows me to layer a design of sudden
red stain over the onions.
I would call my designs abstract. Some would call them
nothing.
Eat. I stand with one
hip against the kitchen counter, eating a bowl of raw onions with tomato ketchup. I know what an act it is
to slice them. The emptiness of the house
despite it bring filled with objects, the sound of cold vegetable flesh
squeaking against my teeth. I don’t really taste, only witness. Sometimes I
don’t feel at all, I simply occupy space, time, expectation, for a while.
But right now I eat raw onions, feeling the acridity fizzing
at my lips, the sharp shock of vinegar in the cheap tomato sauce. My face is
dripping.
It is unacceptable practice.
It is acceptable damage.
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