A FABLE

Jury of grandfathers censured her from a shallow bath of jumping silver, their judgment hissed from ruptured oil bursts in the searing pan on blistered faces conjured by sautéed wild mushrooms running with shriveled sage and wine.  Critical brows rose from the jagged sienna of annulus and gills, exacting scowls that condemned her still, even as the morel cap howled from deep brown boyhood to old age in the unguent heat, roared his condemnation from the grave under a luminous field of shallots.

Ignoring the acrid chorus, the chef attacked her demons, stirring the mushrooms furiously, watching the damning crowd cook down in roiling fits to pinched disapproval, then disappear into the ruffled abstraction of a single benevolent face that spoke in warm forest steam.  There was always an abortive haunting that plagued each new recipe, when her lineage rallied to oppress her unorthodox creations, to kill her before she could give birth to another monstrosity that would taint culinary society with its deformities, could not be defined, must be destroyed.  But with each fresh innovation that recast disparate, even docile, ingredients as a single anarchic recipe colony hundreds strong, the chef distanced herself from the harsh denunciation of generations of mediocre cooks—her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather—their abdomens distended from the success of convention, from the bloat of effusive praise, girdled by the contentment of pleasing every single palate.

It had been difficult for her to find work, even harder to retain an inferior position beneath other chefs of limited vision and skill, so the woman supported her craft as a kitchen ghost, cooking for celebrity chefs with grand public images and slim talent; she would arrive as an early morning shadow from steaming black asphalt still untread, slip across pantries and countertops with the rising yeast, drift through spiked rosemary, over glades of lavender and thyme to cook their signature dishes with anonymous hands in silence.  Fraudulent mince of lemon zest compounded a forged pesto of mint, basil and garlic, each achievement a tightly choreographed set of movements performed only as required, the truth of her infidelity spoken only by her fingers, which ended each workday by swallowing their sterling rings whole, with skin intractably swollen around its metal cuffs.

Tending the pots of barking kitcheneers was a coarse betrayal that prodded her psyche through a bristling march of nights, shallow sleep that gleamed hard and unforgiving with sentience.  Unable to drift away, always tethered to nettle consciousness, her lids closed on a tragedy of furrows as her body thrashed and contorted without ever finding comfort, leaving a shifting wake of imprints, vague displacements in haunted air.  She longed for narcotic detachment in the smooth rolling trance and gliding baton of the ringmasters who controlled her waking life.

But in her studio, the chef practiced her craft with impunity, battling only faint ancestral echoes that distorted her resolution in times of protracted loneliness, when she longed for the touch of her first husband, a man whose tentative fingers were deeply loving, yet incapable of retaining their own Adamitic history, following a series of movements choreographed by another species unfamiliar with the composition and arousal of human skin; if his hand remained too long at a single point on her flesh, it seemed to alter her essential structure, sending a chain of angular convulsions through her body.   His face was painful, almost impossible, to remember, features replaced by a wrenching and tragic image—vaporous projection of a luminous, sanguine child, persecuted by the same people who could just as easily have made his life so exquisitely valuable, following parallel lines in perpetuity, unaware that he was not lost but abandoned, and would reach his mortal end in a roar of violence long before the human stain of adulthood.

The chef allowed her burdens to drift into the maw of a cast iron skillet every night, prelude to mounting a new project.  Ritual curdled in the layers of blisters and warped skin on her fingertips, as she lowered her hands toward the searing olive oil once again, running them through the expanse of scorching grease to obliterate her fingerprints, to sacrifice the distinction of identity in order to face each fresh creation wrapped in the agony of birth and unshackled vision of innocence.

Boiling taro root, she began mashing its purple threads with dried cranberries, sculpting the ambrosial paste into thick cakes, routing an exultation of furrows and filling them with orange zest and pulverized rock sugar.  Laid gently on a plate commissioned from a Japanese ceramicist specifically for this masterwork, the pale lavender cake with its wreath of glowing scarlet eyes hovered over a design of curled iron filings scattered across a dense obsidian glaze.  Shiitakes, morels, and porcinis tumbled onto their final pillow and the dish was complete.  The chef placed her work in one of a dozen mahogany shadowboxes set into the kitchen wall, transitory frames to house each piece for contemplation before tasting.

As was her ritual and custom she ate alone, away from the judgments of her second husband, an unremarkable chef, who thought her creations deformed and odious; monstrous islands, he called them, each one an offense to mass sensibilities.  They would be rejected out of hand, he pronounced frequently in grave baritone, an embarrassment to everyone and best avoided.   Indulge in your ivory tower projects, he directed her with a conspiratorial wink, but preserve your job and know your place—hovering above counters and below perception as a kitchen ghost.

Replacement husband was a creature hobbled by sensory autism.  He always looked crooked and strangely artificial, as if his spinal column had been broken and reassembled by mischievous children.   His pores were raw slits, extinct holes sutured shut long ago, and the serrated air curling from his mouth forced his lips into subtly grotesque shapes which never matched the words they expelled like toxins.   Pleasure and its beckoning deformities were met with soldier’s discipline in a stark battle for eternal control, and he lived in fear of discovering one extraordinary taste that would drain the significance out of everything else in his life, an exquisite saboteur that would render sights, sounds, even the touch of his wife’s hand, weightless.

The hedonism of flavor was strictly reviled, distinction and history wiped clean by abstinence, ushered to the brink of nonexistence by his fear.  Possessed by Spartan parasites, he shrank from the gustatory weight of his ingredients: olives inhabited skin to core by raging sun chariots and vengeful Aegean brine; ginger root infusing centuries of Chinese blood, racing through veins and brushes to permeate silk as snaking orchids and falling snow; cardamom stretched odalisque in the scented weight of limbs denied free will, carried along by the perpetual respiration of the desert.  He never felt his own breath or saw the fog of animation on mirrors, just watched his chest rise and fall with the mechanics of an iron lung.

On a cluster of blank pages in the back of a leather-bound book the woman recorded her ingredients, proportion and succession, the roots of inspiration in random calligraphy of thoughts spun too violently for such a fastidious hand.  Such passionate scrawl suited the erratic character of the book itself.  It was a volume haunted equally by brilliance and failure.   Unfathomable sadness emanated from several dozen exquisite, fragile, achingly tentative paintings of culinary and medicinal herbs—a labor left unfinished by a fearful artist whose collective body of work ended with the last plate.

Absently clutching a star anise pod, closing her fingers so the sharp points marked her palm and its scent eclipsed the singed odor of her own flesh, the woman stared at the lucid imprint on her hand, occupying a single point in time as a body wrapped in sleep—until the rosette brand faded to a quivering web of lines that ended abruptly at the edge of her mortal grip.  The perfect star was returned to its impermeable glass canister, and the chef set about examining a whispered sketch of chervil in one of the volume’s last fully realized pages; skittish filaments erupted into heady, reckless plumes, conjuring a faint mask hiding something voracious and feral, the botanical roar that emanated from all plants, imperceptible life unfolding at frequencies that passed safely beyond human perception.  Translucent leaves seduced insects and digested them alive.  Feathered roots forced apart concrete, invaded brick, raped stone.  Hush of seeds shattered by alien forms exploding from their immaculate loins.  Mob of imperious heads reduced to bestial instinct—shrinking from the night, screaming for rain, and lunging with acute intelligence at the sun.   Blossoms eclipsed images of grieving humanity on deathbeds to become the sole inhabitants and final reflection in eyes that closed for the last time.

Each floral plate was a siren entity.  Wails of oxide seduction would have doomed sailors to perish on jagged cliffs, were it not for the painter’s technical mastery over the demon flora, allaying their poisonous voices with an exquisitely refined blending of pigments and conjuring of lush textures—just long enough to allow compositions of aching delicacy.  But when the viewer lingered over the perfectly channeled lines of a verdant stalk, a dull vibration would begin to emanate from the painting, sound that arched its spine in barbed agony, column of fractured discs rearing up in a cacophony of hideous tones.

Snaking tarragon and bristling thyme were beaten unconscious and lashed to the page as comatose life, reduced to the magnificent serenity of painted lines by a singular act of violence—the fate of gods fallen to earth and forced to live amongst mortals, always fearing discovery.  The artist understood what grievous shadows lay beneath watercolor beauty, knew he was surrounded by a population that would hunt him down and easily kill him for drinking too deeply from this truth.  If ever they should awaken from their collective somnolence and discover him.

Remorse invaded each plate, spoke of the painter who captured the essence of leaves, veins, roots, and stalks—knew the demonic passions of their inhuman skin better than his own—but abandoned the labor long before completion.  He could never feel privileged in his human suit again.  Too close to recognize his own screeches and wails from theirs in the chlorophyll din, the man became a botanical shade.   Anthropocentric universe dissolved into anthophore, as the artist’s specter began to inhabit their cells; values were ripped away then lost altogether in the plane of unrecognizable architecture.

So the artist’s impulse traveled along impoverished lines growing ever thinner, traversing a single thread along the stalk of a mute herb—just one of many flawless parallel lines running in perfect, silent furrows without end.  The chef lost her adored first husband—gentle painter of placid, innocuous watercolors bound for a future of gift shops and gilt frames—that day in his final botanical plate, when the last chemical vestiges of his will dissolved into the inviolate leaves of rabid, howling angelica.

Every night since her first husband’s death, the woman slept with his unfinished book beneath the covers, trying to extract his obscure warmth from its ruinous pages.  Despite the sharp edges and harsh angles, the book never cut her skin or left an imprint on her body.   At first, this tireless, baseless devotion simply annoyed her second husband, then exasperated, and finally enraged him.  The volume’s taut leather corners had the presence of inhabited skin as they dug into his side, and its pages rustled softly with the inspiration of grotesque life—the same curdled air that ran through her kitchen beasts.

Jealousy overtook him one night, and he wrenched her hands from around the book, breaking his wife’s wrist without regret.  Grabbing the treasured volume of paintings, he ran with it into the kitchen, turned on the stove, and commenced the burning of her beloved freak, maniacally plunging the prostrate entity into the flames to destroy any trace of the images on its pages.  With tearless eyes, he placed it directly onto the burner’s metal claw and watched its skin blacken and split.  Gleeful, agonized immolation was interrupted by an unrecognizable howl—wind through the gutless stalks of drowned, yellow reeds—coming from the doorway.   His wife, wrapped in a moan of bedclothes and unfathomable loss, clutched her wrist, bent now to an inhuman geometric, and wailed.  He watched her without pity.

Eagerly, he turned back to witness the last coils of destruction, but the acrid smoke had crept away across the countertop and the book was gone.  A man’s charred corpse lay across the stovetop, naked obsidian that smelled as much like burned leaves as human skin.

Copyright  ©  February 4, 2004 – Julie Rauer