Get Out of the Kitchen

GiaB prompt #4 Cooking

How she had loved to watch him cook! The way he seemed so confident with the knife, knew which spices and herbs worked with which ingredients, and made everything from scratch — he was like one of those TV chefs. That was twenty years ago when they were first dating. To a girl who had grown up on home cooked but very English food, he opened up a whole new world of tastes and textures. She was in awe of him, truly. Of course, twenty years is a long time, during which the novelty soon wore off.

These days the sight or sound of him in the kitchen filled her with anxiety and dread.

Often, she still enjoyed the meals he cooked, and she knew she should be grateful to have had a meal prepared for her; it was no longer romantic, but hey, it was a more essential kind of sustenance.

He didn’t like her cooking. Sometimes he would complain that he had to do all the cooking, but of course, that wasn’t true, he simply chose to because he didn’t want to eat the sort of food she cooked. Truth is, once the novelty wore off all those years ago, she realized she actually liked that plain old English food, but he? Not so much.

Yet it wasn’t the style of cuisine that filled her with trepidation at the sound of the spoon clanging against the pan or the blender whirring furiously. No. It was the undeniable awareness that the kitchen would be a damned mess, and she’d have to clean it.

Why couldn’t he just put things away when finished with them? Every single item used would be there, with not an inch of the work surface to spare, and food would be all over the hob from his overly enthusiastic stirring and tossing of the food which, no matter how good it would taste, was doomed to be the source of much contention.

On the morning of the first day of August, in the midst of a heatwave, the heat had already reached an unbearable degree as she entered the kitchen at 6 a.m. to pour herself her first cup of coffee. She always needed two to start the day.

For a long time, she had been unable to find the will to tidy up then clean up the kitchen in the evenings, choosing instead to do it in two stages in the mornings.

During the first boil of the kettle and brew of the coffee, she would tidy up. With every item that she put away or binned she would mutter curses under her breath.

While the second coffee got underway she would, with a new lease of energy from the first cup, set to the task of actually cleaning. The dishwasher would be emptied and reloaded, the surfaces wiped clean. The flies always made her feel disgusted with herself for not doing it the night before.

In the heat of that morning, though, something snapped. Perhaps it was a combination of the mess, the heat, and the sheer accumulation of years that pushed her over the edge. Maybe it was the glass breaking as it was knocked to the floor when she slipped with the bottle of oil. She could never really be sure.

He came down after hearing the glass break and the woman he’d watched age for two decades scream in frustration. He could tell by the sound she made that she wasn’t physically injured but releasing something from deep inside, the only place from which such a sound could have come. He didn’t rush.

When he entered the kitchen he saw her fury rise through her quicker than flames bursting through a window as it finally shatters in the heat of a house fire.

The broken glass was in her hand when her pent up rage propelled her towards him. Neither of them expected it. It was the warm feeling of blood trickling down her arm that brought her from her blind fury back into the situation, just in time for her to step out of the way as he collapsed onto the floor where she had stood. What a mess.

Now, in the cold, damp dreariness of an English winter morning, as she sat in her prison clothes eating her plain, English prison food, she finally remembered how good his cooking had been.

Thank you, Victor Sarkin and Chirag for this tempting prompt.

Readers, why not have a go yourself? Check out the prompt here:

Melissa Bee, Martine Weber, Stephen Dalton, James G Brennan, Imad, — I’d love to read something from you in response to this prompt (if you’ve already written something and I’ve missed it, let me know!)