Kitchen Conversation

“Who are you?” asked Pot.
“Butter,” said Butter with a thick French accent. She was wrapped in a fancy, colorful foil that read “Made in France”.
“Are you new?” said Pot, feeling a bit overprotective of the Stove and its space.
“Non-non, I am matured. I’ve been in the Refrigerator for a week, and just got out.”
“Well, congratulations and welcome! So what are you in for?”
“Purification.”
“Gee,” muttered Pot, skeptical and worried at the same time. This purification business did not sound friendly at all.
“Not ‘gee’, you’re simple pots! It’s Ghee.” Butter’s attitude changed from tolerable to arrogant in a blink of an eye. “It appears you’re unaware of the concept of Butter-purification,” she said and moved slightly away from Pot.
“Enlighten me,” he said with composed indifference.
“Agh, for Stove’s sake, I didn’t have to explain it to Le Creuset.”
“Who?”
“The wonderful French Saucepan, of course!” replied Butter indignantly.
“And where is your French Pot now? I don’t see him anywhere around here…”
“He’s Saucepan, not a pot! And he’s currently preoccupied,” she said, collecting herself in preparation. Irritability, or worse, anger, wouldn't do the purification any good.
“Oh? Preoccupied with what, stains, perhaps?”
“How did you know?” Asked Butter in disbelief.
“So I was right!” Pot exclaimed joyously. “For your information, we simple pots as you stated, don’t get covered with ugly spots and stains. Ever. Therefore, we never go out of commission.”
He was right, thought Butter, and this was not easy to admit. Indeed, simple pots were more reliable. But he didn’t have to know this; better keep the simpletons of the world unaware and unmotivated or else they could replace the lovely French saucepans. “Regardless, you should be honored at being chosen for such a sacred act,” she finally said, and began slowly undressing, keeping dangerous philosophies to herself.
Unfortunately, having waited too long in the warm room, Butter’s shiny garb began to stick to most of her sweaty body. The inner lining of her dress, which was supposed to slide easily away, was now caught in the soft goo of her square shoulders, waist, and hips, leaving small blobs of yellowish spikes all over her body. She paused for a moment. I shall look like a cactus, she thought in distress, and felt as though her makeup was about to run.
“Do you need help with that?” offered Pot, observing her struggles with concern.
“I can manage!” she snapped, and continued peeling off the stupid garment with as much dignity as she could muster… Oh, how she missed Le Creuset, a compatriot, and such a wonderfully enameled friend. He’d understand her predicament and would never ridicule her. She cast a quick glance at Pot. Any moment now he will begin his mockery of me, she thought, bracing herself for the worst.
But Pot, who had never seen anything like it before, stared at Butter in awe. To him, her naked body appeared so soft and luscious, its color warm and rich, and she looked so appetizing. “Uh,” uttered Pot, “it’s getting really hot here.”
“Oh?” She murmured, surprised at Pot’s metallic leer.

*****
Special thanks to brilliant author,
Peter Wortsman, for his literary advice.

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AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SHORT STORY

I wrote for the first time when I was nine. It was a poem, a half-page long. I wrote it in cursive as neatly as a nine-year old could. That way, my grandmother would be able to read it. Or I’d be able to read it to her, fluidly without “ums”, since it was written so clearly.
My grandma glanced at it. “If you keep at it,” she growled, “you’ll be cleaning toilets for a living.”
That’d be a horrifying profession, I thought, shuddering. I had a hyper-acute sense of smell and could detect the stench of mildew and waste carried shamelessly by our nineteenth century crumbly building’s drafts, and by impudent winds blowing through a tiny window leaf of our apartment. (I could’ve been a dog in one of my past lives.)
I must have wiggled my nose. excessively because my grandma said that I’d be better off as a professional sniffer…the way I study at school and the type of books I read, I’d never get into a college. “You’d be sniffing shit for kopeikas,” she snapped. “Here!” she pointed her thick, straight index finger, the fingernail lacquered with a pale-rose nail polish, at the volumes of Pushkin and Lermontov on our bookshelves, “you can get a head start.”
I didn’t want to read Pushkin and Lermontov—they sounded too rhymey, which felt like a rolling pin working through my grey matter, flattening anything that was once three-dimensional. I also didn’t like the fact that Pushkin and Lermontov died senseless deaths at a young age—stupid duels.
Regardless, I loved fairytales and science fiction and fantasy and anything that had nothing to do with the world in which I lived. But go and try convincing my grandma that Alexander Beliayev, Fredric Brown, Asimov, and Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, to name a few, were as good as Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Gogol. It’s like trying to prove to her that WWII was won in collaboration with other nations. “Stalin and Russians won the war,” she’d say, “period!”
So I kept my prose and poems to myself, writing them in my head for over thirty years until I’d begun running out of terabytes in my memory. That was a surprise, since I always believed that the human mind was a limitless repository modeled after the universe’s infinite expanse. I guess anything ethereal or material that’s confined to a box, a.k.a. a skull, is bound to run out of space sooner or later. This fact compelled me to start putting it all down on paper.

“Original, ...”
– Kirkus Reviews