flash fiction: spoon
vera wati’s job today is to take the certain plates of food cooked for the residents of gruer’s home for the elderly, the plates intended for those too sick or weak or lazy to chew, who don’t like to chew, or who don’t have the teeth for it — the plate today of carrots and beets and pork — and to dump each plate in a high powered blender, run it for about 30 seconds and pour it out steaming on a plate — likely would have been better to pour in a bowl, call it a soup, because vera knew that yes sometimes soups are made this way, so why not? — her supervisor jaret responded, i don’t know so so goes it — brown beet-carrot-pork liquid pancaking on a plate, you’re welcome —
a nurse wheels a covered body
past the entrance to the kitchen, headed toward the morgue, vera pushes the blender button as she watches the bed roll by, the nurse this time is chun, he walks so fast during these jobs to the morgue, he wants to rid of the body get it over with who wouldn’t — does the morgue have to be next to the kitchen? — dead folks aren’t a daily event exactly but regular enough, to be expected — the blended food poured now on another plate smells good today, the combination works, the beets probably have this way of sweetening things up — someone’s told vera that beets are common in minnesota, all over the place, on the roads people run them over, so beets die too —
a body may smell sweet when at first decomposing
a certain amount of time, the rot comes later, but initially there’s something like caramel, just releases — vera heard that once, not sure if it’s true, maybe people you know just trying to make a story, who doesn’t want to make a story — no seriously this blend today isn’t smelling so bad, vera finds a bowl on the other side of the sink, thinks it looks clean, yes it’s clean, and she pours part of the brothy liquid into the bowl and the rest on the next white dinner plate — there chun is like running back, from the morgue past the entrance to the kitchen, on his way to the elevator or maybe the stairs, someone else dead to pick up? — got spooked, the dead one’s finger moved? — sometimes the muscles still go spastic after death, so maybe chun saw a finger twitch, or an eye open —
on her break vera grabbed her soup
hiding the bowl from jaret next to her hip while walking, though why would he care? — plates returned nearly untouched all the time, nobody is on a schedule, writing a neat schedule with start and stop times doesn’t mean the body and mind will follow it, their intestines follow their own timelines, or their tongues, or their noses — vera sits at the breakroom table, by herself, she finds a pepper shaker and sprinkles pepper on the surface of the soup and with a spoon from the kitchen’s silverware she dips and sips on the soup, not too hot, so she finishes off the spoonful — the aroma wafts through vera’s nose outward, so sweet like those beets splattered across the road — she wants to invite chun to taste just to see — see what he might think, might compare the taste to — eats another spoonful this time quickly — this third time she swings the spoon tick-tocking in front of her mouth, back and forth, celebrating her discovery —
