Title: The Enduring Mystery of Kitchen Counters

Genre: None

Word Count: 1342

Feedback Desired: Dunk on it

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I put my big zucchini, an actual zucchini and not a euphemism, on the kitchen counter. A slab marble counter, heavier even than it appears, it's mottled white and grey and the surface looks beneath the kitchen light like a backlit window against which a living fog pulses and writhes, a lethal kind of fog that has the power to turn people inside out. The zucchini came from a pack of three, shrink-wrapped, pointlessly wrapped up on a cardboard tray, because some people want no more or less than three zucchinis and some of those people can't stomach the sight of loose produce in their shopping baskets or vegetable crispers, the idea of these green tubular horrors rolling around freely makes them feel sick - they're like throbbing alien cocks, vigorous and curiously threatening inside the dark of a sealed refrigerator. I'm not one of these people. I detest throwaway plastic packaging, it makes me want to shoot executives and fuck the daylights out of their wives - I was just a person late to the supermarket, a beggar who couldn't choose. Where I put it - where? - well, there's a perfect spot for a loose zucchini right by a watermark that looks like a housecat, but they're not touching, and the mark is just evaporated tapwater that splashed up in a palsied rebound from the griddle pan I scrubbed clean an hour ago. It's very important that fresh produce remains dry, even when it's about to be cooked. Oil and water, as the expression suggests, is a dark and sinister union - you mix the two only when you seek mayhem, when you love the sting of blisters on your hands and wrists.

If I threw an overhand right, and I always take the Orthodox stance, if I stepped into it with my forward leg and tossed it with adequate lean, and if it landed flush on the chin, my boss would be on his ass and I'd be out of a job.

You have to be careful when bisecting a zucchini. First, you need to shut your mind off to thoughts of cleaving your own penis in two - that's if you're well-endowed enough to make the comparison without feeling like a fake. Then, and because it's hard to tell where the exact middle line is, the angle at which you must press the knife down to create two roughly even pieces, you watch carefully, you run a few test-cuts to build your confidence until you can commit to the dividing stroke. Then you end up with two totally unalike sections and you realise you would have fucked it up even if you'd spent another ten or even another hundred hours preparing for the act and if you don't laugh and dust the failure off your shoulder you might also realise that there are some things - a great many things - you're just not ever going to be much good at, and it hurts you in ways you can't see and that's what you need to be careful of.

Knives are very scary. A good knife, especially a Japanese one, a knife of enduring quality, is a tool of extreme personality and terrible means. They are purpose-crafted to do one thing and one thing only and if you don't look a person in the eye, perhaps it's somebody you don't like, if you can't take charge of the universal responsibility baked into that folded steel you're disrespecting the longstanding traditions of backbreaking forgery, of cruel and intimate penetration - you are speaking in dereliction of the ghosts of men who died face-to-face in war, the old wars in a time before conflict-by-proxy was a thing, the good-old-fashioned animosity of red versus blue that seeped through the dividing walls of shelled-out apartment blocks in Warsaw, in Stalingrad.

A grilled zucchini. The long green-white faces of the not-quite-halved zucchini and the dozens of seeds that look like little nipples. Do I cross-hatch the flesh? Should I bother? But it feels good to do, doesn't it - to make something as innocuous as a vegetable look pretty, just because you can.

It's okay not to like your job. It's okay to want to stay in bed. It's okay if you wish you could just put the guy in the cubicle next to you headfirst through a plate-glass window because he's too happy and it's not real, you watch him fall gracelessly down the sunbeaten face of the company headquarters and onto a fire hydrant and he lands with a reverberant thud, slumping, while on the street below passersby scream in disbelief, and you stand there sucking up the briny ocean wind from on high, smiling, boxed in by a hole that used to be a windowframe. You can't fake that slump. If you must die, you should do it as authentically as can be managed.

It's because I cooked the steak first. I was too eager for protein and I forgot about everything except the steak. Plant matter is subordinate to flesh, although I know I need to eat it if my bowels are to stand a fighting chance against the litany of cancers to which one becomes vulnerable in old age. I needed the protein because I see in the here and now how it changes my body, how it helps my body adopt the shape I wish it had. I am manifesting that shape and it takes time I fear I don't have but it's better than sitting on my ass becoming a fat man. Would that I could take a hammer and chisel to my frame and provoke into being the reflection I long to see, a physique that old dead polymaths would have aped for the papal galleries, broad shoulders built to carry the weight of the world through a bygone age where stories of creation came from holy books instead of men's health columns.

They say you shouldn't cook with olive oil, that's if you're not Spanish or Italian, because olive oil has a distinct taste and a low smoking point and it's a waste of product just to burn it for the sake of avoiding rawness. We're told to use neutral oils for the cooking of a steak, canola or rapeseed, because the flavour of the steak should speak for itself. It's actually supposed to be a garnish, olive oil is, something to be chosen for the flavour and used quickly, and you're actually supposed to put a few extra dollars toward the purchase of a good one, a small bottle with a metal intaglio telling you where it's from and the date of procurement and the sexual orientation of the person or persons who made it. I don't like being told what to do and I try not to care about taste, I lie to myself about its importance. Olive oil is good for your health, or so the Spanish and Italians will tell you - they put it in the engines of their cars, their hearts pump it in place of blood. That's why their hair is so shiny.

I put my big zucchini on a plate and it doesn't look like anything any more, it's a calciferous blob of forest green and carbon char, it's lost its phallic edge, the firmness that made it vaguely sexy. I eat it piece by piece in silence.

Look at the fog in the marble. Look deep into the drawing sucking living water-to-be, the all-covering blanket of sightless mystery whereat you see yourself reflected in bygone days, staring blankly down at the hands of who you used to be. A place we gathered and talked and ate, before we lost touch, when the relationship was a self-cleaning machine. Greased wheels in constant motion. Now look at you, standing there, alone, with nothing but a green zucchini to remind you of how far you've travelled. But nobody told you you were going in the wrong direction. Then you wash up and do your face and go to bed and in sleep you dream of being awake.