Leftovers Inspire Prose

The leftovers in the fridge are smelly reminders of you. Your favourite sauces half emptied squished between the expired ketchup. Remember the purple ones when we were little? There was something wrong with a flavor being identified with colour. Orange is orange, that’s a given. Purple equates to what exactly? Setting the standard for artificiality in the young ones.


Even the Tupperware you left is marked with chili stains. I always hated to scrape off the molding parts, though truth be told, it took me weeks to finally toss it.

When we first broke up I had to throw away the food you bought me. It was ridden with association. Organic apples got chucked into the garbage. I could have tasted the guilt of your acts.

Cooking as a means of seduction you first invited me over for food. Dough from scratch you kneeded it expertly showing off the movements of your skilled hands. Twisting and grinding. Mashing and pounding. Just enough spice to make it taste right. Preheating for [culinary] pleasure.

Bun in the oven. 45 minutes is all it took. Rise.

Rise up from your kitchen and come into the bedroom conveniently located right off of it. Hearing your roommates cook and stumble drunken into it late at night we held each other. Rubbing ginger and vinegar on our skins. Paper fragility of an onion to be peeled roughly until (pre-cum) leakage. Cut, cut, damn.

Mixed into the soup, blood. Toss more curry powder in to disguise the putridity. Salt was used in the middle ages to do that to spoiled meat. Good thing neither of us dine on that carnal sin. Mrs. Nesbits Meat Pies. Jack the Ripper would have something to say about that. Never to be seen, his crimes hidden in the crust. You choose dust instead.

Garbage never taken out, stench from across the house. Cat piss and rotten salad. Styrophone containers half hazardly tossed on top, you’d bitch about the waste. Ecological footprint your socks are always dirty. Never to disintegrate you’d compost them instead.

Reaching into the depths of the fridge things are growing even without your presence. I’d pull out too early, forgetting about you. Science projects with minds of their own. Gagging upon opening, similar to first eating you. No entrees we’d dined together on vegetables and rice. Pure in intentions we’d fuck on the kitchen table. In front of the maintenance guy across the street peering in.

That rag smelled like wet dog. Why you’d touch it, I don’t know. You’d smell like dog in the morning. Drooling just as much a pool of garlic, no wait, pussy breath. You complained that day that your hand smelled of sex. Your own fault for reaching down before breakfast.
Not so sanitary your hands would be cleansed with Sunlight lemon dish detergent. Doing the washing up they say. Special knives for parsnip patties and cutting boards never big enough. Big enough that it fit.

You’d feed the masses if you could but in the meantime you’d feed your lovers tidbits of soy and French wine from exes. Drain the bottle. Suck it dizzy dry. Glasses disappear with each passing night. Red elipsor ring on your lips. Ring around the rosey. A pocket full of dirty and rocks shoved down your front pouch.

Traveling across the country we’d land in another kitchen, oil splattered the same and burned flesh to where you had to caress to forget the pain. Suck on it hard and eye the sore. Fan and heat beating down on bodies weighed down with famine.

Fingers sunk into rotting fruit. A red pepper bent and mangled to the elements that preserved it. Seeds spilling out, no longer good, exposed. You try to salvage its meat to cook together. Scraping and stuffing it back turned hunched over a dark corner. Ignoring the microwave a Wok replaces life giving.

Breakfast of flesh is that of champions. We’d fuck til we were both winners. Juice in the morning. Drinking deep that sweetness followed by black tea and marmalade. Crunchy toast crumbs pissed you off eating on dotted sheets.

Scrubbing the potatoes clean the dirt would run down the drain. Thermostat is messed up so fresh things are freezing. Who’d want to bite down on that? I toss out the rest of your Tupperware experiments and close the humming fridge. Heat generating a soft pool my foot is wet. I slip.