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It's A Five Minute Walk
He would never say he'd ever been a huge fan of vegetables. Especially ones that bit back.
But the overturned carton, the limp leaf of lettuce draped over the back of his chair that sat by the window, the smattering of fried rice and the egg bits that came with it over nearly every surface in the study, the shards of chicken dotting his shirt and the wall behind him, the various cartons, dumplings, and sauces dispersed about the room, and the smug blackbean sitting inside a chili pepper at the epicenter definitely didn't do anything for his love of or trust in vegetables.
Fob gurgled from under his desk and beneath a few shards of chicken, which slurped off his shirt, his relatively freshly cleaned and ironed white shirt (formerly, of course), onto the floor beneath the chair he'd been occupying not thirty seconds prior, attempting to dig in to the mound of chicken in blackbean sauce that was threatening to spill off the plate and onto numerous papers and manila folders he'd never got around to opening that served as his placemat.
Unfortunately, due to the plastic containers the bulk of Chinese food was being delivered in these days Helen was now lying on the floor opposite his desk, and if she wasn't unconscious she was exhibiting a tremendous degree of self-control and quietness in the face of the Chinese dinner they'd been about to work through at Fob's desk exploding. He couldn't tell, from under the desk, whether she was bleeding or not, what with the new carpet he'd bought just recently not being as conducive to puddles of blood forming and spilling into view as wood floors were. Not that he'd know, as he didn't often have people over, bleeding on the wood floors in his flat.
"It's a warning."
"What?" Fob looked up over the top of the desk, sending a few more chicken shards floor-ward. The cleaner was going to have a hell of a time of it when they came round after ringing him at work and giving him a hell of a time of it for not being able to eat properly.
"A warning."
"No, I got that bit, thanks. A warning how? I meant. Or for what? Either one of the two, or both, would be good."
He'd never seen a blackbean look so smug before. It was unnerving, almost.
But still, it had been stewing in the juices of other beans not so fortunate as itself for the last thirty minutes, at least, so he figured that sort of experience would lend to a certain lack of worry about the smaller things in life. Like, for example, that one was a blackbean, and not particularly entitled to look smug.
"A warning. Stay out of things you don't belong in."
Not terribly original, he thought.
The second thought to pass through his mind after that one was that it might not be a bean at all, but a fly, perched in the chili pepper. Not that that made him feel any better about vegetables, it could just have easily have been the chili pepper, the fly being an unlucky witness to the whole event. And he would never forget having to eat spinach as a kid, though that never had quite the same consequences as he found himself confronting here.
"I'm most certainly not a fly."
"Oh Jesus, and you can read my mind?" Fob reached backwards for his chair, with about as much success and fumbling as you'd expect from someone reaching backwards for a chair whilst not turning around and talking to a blackbean perched in the middle of a chili pepper, former residents of a chicken in blackbean sauce.
"No, that's just what most people think first off, and I like to cut those impressions short, if I can."
He most definitely hated vegetables.
disclaimer:
Due to the overwhelmingly postive response to last week's issue by himself, the preceding is an excerpt from William Murphy's Curious, a novel, his first novel.
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