Nobody's hand reaches out.
Her rose tattoo, there, in the center of the scrap.
And, still not looking at it, Chef Assassin shouts, “Take it!”
A rustle of fairy-tale satin and brocade skirts, and Baroness Frostbite is back among us. She says, “Oh my God . . .”
A paper plate hovers under the dripping red scrap, and Chef Assassin drops it. On the plate, it's meat. A thin steak. The way a cutlet looks. Or those long scraps of meat labeled “strip steaks” in the butcher's case.
Chef Assassin's elbow is bobbing again, sawing. His other hand lifts scrap after dripping scrap out of the steaming red center of that huge white flower. The paper plate is piled high and starting to fold in half from the weight. Red juice spilling off one edge. The Baroness goes to get another plate. Chef Assassin fills that, too.
The Earl of Slander, still sitting on the back of the body, he shifts his weight, pulling his face away from the steaming mess. Not the nothing smell of cold, clean meat from the supermarket. This is the smell of animals half run-over and smearing a path of shit and blood as they drag their shattered back legs off a hot summer highway. Here's the messy smell of a baby the moment after it's born.
Then the body, Comrade Snarky, lets out a little moan.
It's the soft groan of someone dreaming in her sleep.
And Chef Assassin falls backward, both hands dripping. The knife left behind, jutting straight up from the flower's red center—until the dropped skirts flutter, lower, sift down to hide the mess. The Baroness drops the first paper plate, burdened with meat. The flower closing. The Earl of Slander springs to his feet, and he's off her. We, we're all standing back. Staring. Listening.
Something needs to happen.
Something needs to happen.
Then, one, two, three, four, somewhere else, Saint Gut-Free whispers, “Help us!”
The soft, regular foghorn of his voice.
From somewhere else, you hear Director Denial calling, “Here . . . kitty, kitty, kitty . . .” Her words stretched long and then broken by sobs, she says, “Come . . . to Mama . . . my baby . . .”
His hands webbed with gummy red, Chef Assassin flexes his fingers, not touching anything, just staring at the body, he says, “You told me . . .”
And Miss America crouching forward, her leather boots creak. She slides two fingers into the lace collar and presses the side of the blue-white neck. She says, “Snarky's dead.” She nods at the Earl of Slander and says, “You must've forced some air out of her lungs.” She nods at the meat spilled off the plate, now breaded with dust and lint on the foyer carpet, and Miss America says, “Pick that up . . .”
The Earl of Slander rewinds his tape, and Comrade Snarky's voice moans and moans the same moan. Our parrot. Comrade Snarky's death taped over the Duke of Vandals' taped over Mr. Whittier's taped over Lady Baglady's death.
How Comrade Snarky died was probably a heart attack. Mrs. Clark says it's from a shortage of thiamine, what we call vitamin B1. Or it could've been a shortage of potassium in her bloodstream, causing muscle weakness and, again, a heart attack. That was how Karen Carpenter died in 1983, after years of anorexia nervosa. Fainted dead on the floor like this. Mrs. Clark says it was no doubt a heart attack.
Nobody really dies of starvation, Mrs. Clark says. They die of pneumonia brought on by malnutrition. They die of kidney failure brought on by low potassium. They die of shock caused by bones broken by osteoporosis. They die of seizures caused by lack of salt.
However she died, Mrs. Clark says, that's how most of us will. Unless we eat.
At last, our devil commands us. We're so proud of her.
“Easy as skinning a chicken breast,” Chef Assassin says, and he drops another lump of meat on the dripping paper plate. He says, “Christ Almighty, I do love these knives . . .”
Plan B
A Poem About Chef Assassin
“To become a household word,” says Chef Assassin, “all you need is a rifle.”
This he learned early, watching the news. Reading the paper.
Chef Assassin standing onstage, he wears those black-and-white-checkered pants
that only professional cooks get to wear.
Billowing big, but still stretched tight to cover his ass.
His hands, his fingers, a patchwork of scabs and scars. Shiny old burns.
His white shirtsleeves rolled up,
and all the hair singed off the muscle of his forearms.
His thick arms and legs that don't bend
so much as they fold at the knee and elbow.
Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment flickers:
where two close-up hands, the fingernails clean and the palms perfect
as a pair of pink gloves,
they skin a chicken breast.
His face, a round screen, lost under a layer of fat, his mouth lost under the pastry brush
of a little mustache,
Chef Assassin says, “That's my backup plan.”
The Chef says, “If my garage band never gets a record contract—”
if his book never finds a publisher—
if his screenplay never gets a green light—
if no network picks up his pilot episode—
The Chef, his face worms and twitches with those perfect hands:
skinning and boning,
pounding and seasoning,
breading and frying and garnishing,
until that piece of dead flesh looks too pretty to eat.
A gun. A scope. Good aim and a motorcade.
What he learned as a kid, watching the news on television, every night.
“So I'm not forgotten,” the Chef says.
So his life isn't wasted.
He says, “That's my Plan B.”
Product Placement
A Story by Chef Assassin
To Mr. Kenneth MacArthur
Manager of Corporate Communications
Kutting-Blok Knife Products, Inc.
Dear Mr. MacArthur,
Just so you know, you make a great knife. An excellent knife.
It's tough enough doing professional kitchen work without tolerating
