Thermidor by John Cunningham
It’s just that I hadn’t seen one cooked live before. However squeamish I felt though, I hoped the taste of it boiled would compensate. Our cook had suggested that we look for a medium one that felt heavy for its size.
“The meat is juicier,” he said.
“Does it really need to be alive?” I said, “It seems so cruel.”
“Yes,” he replied, ‘“t’s been sedated in your huge freezer. They don’t feel pain as we do. Trust me, I’m a professional.”
Together we lifted it up from the kitchen board and brought it towards the vat.
It had been brought to the boil. We both placed it head first in, until it was completely submerged. He then brought the water back up to the boil. Every now and then I lifted the lid to check its progress. It was turning red, its legs had stopped twitching and were tightening towards its body.
“One last task to complete,’ he said. ’We need to separate the head from the body.”
Lifting the dish out of the vat, we placed it carefully back on the board to drain and cool down. He told me to fetch him the sharp knife he kept for such an occasion from his bag of utensils.
“We can do this together,” he suggested, kindly.
After agreeing, he pencilled a cross on the head for where the point of the large shared knife needed to penetrate. Together, with the knife, we pushed down. It widened the cranium for the brain of the dish to spill. Its crunch made me retch.
‘We can save this for a nice jus,’ he had smiled, extracting the brain from the skull. ‘There is hardly any waste on a boiled human.’
It’s just that I hadn’t seen one cooked live before.
John Cunningham is an emerging writer with a background in teaching. Long listed in and published in Crime Bits, with an academic article published by Routledge in a journal entitled: Linking Theory With Practice In The Classroom. His short story entitled: Elvis is alive and well but… was published recently in Literally Stories: Literallystories2014.com. He aims to conjure, in his stories, realistic, evocative settings inhabited by vivid, quirky characters servicing thought provoking plots.
Photo by Caroline Hernandez on Unsplash
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