Restaurant Calamari Fuego
I watched the woman who was no longer my friend Patricia but had become someone else, someone red-faced, eyes rolled back, hair dark with sweat painted to her skull.
She was reaching out, hands grasping and closing around nothing, but she stood unsupported, her feet planted. I tried to take her hand, but she shook it off, the momentary loss of concentration sending a flicker of annoyance over her face.
Flames drummed under a dozen gleaming steel pots. A chef in grey and black striped scrubs tipped out a pot through a funnel of steam. A deep purple octopus-like thing slid into a dish, tentacles with whitened suckers subsiding below the edges. The chef passed the pot impatiently to a minion and drizzled a deep burgundy sauce over the octopus, which sizzled. With a pair of tongs, he gathered up tendrils of purple cabbage and long bubbly leaves of dark green spinach and arranged them over the dish in quick flourishes.
He placed it on a clean white bench under a row of spotlights, turning it once, twice, and a waiter lifted it and was off through the swinging door into the dim, candle-lit restaurant.
Patricia groaned and slumped forward. The head chef held her by one shoulder. As she stared blankly forward, all he was interested in was completing the cut, as a junior chef gathered a grey loop of intestines to stop it reaching the floor. It seemed to be alive. He had a handkerchief over his mouth and nose, and braced himself to keep it from arching its main sucker at him.
The head chef was cutting, with a foot-long, hand’s width gleaming knife, at the tuber where it connected to Patricia’s healthy pink tissue, extruding from a half-moon cut below her ribcage. A plastic suction tube carried out a stream of dark blood into a pan already simmering on the oven behind her. With a sneer of concentration, the head chef cut, separating pink from grey, deftly rotating his wrist without a touch to either side. The cut completed, the grey tuber fell into the under-chef’s lap, the head chef turned and walked away, grabbing a folded cloth from a pile to clean his knife, and two more attendants jumped forward to support and detach Patricia.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder.
“The rioja brandy will wear off soon,” said a middle-aged, blonde chef with sweat running down her forehead from her long shift. She held a long knife down by her side. Three attendants stood behind her with tubes and bowls. “What’ll it be?”
I held up my hand. Along the side of my palm, under the skin, was a shiver of darkness.
“You’re sure?” she said, sizing me up. “I can see them in your spleen, shoulder and left aorta. Just ripe, they’d all be delicious, whatever you chose.”
“I mainly want vegetables this meal.”
“Okay, but you shouldn’t leave those much longer.”
“Next time,” I said, patting away my sweat. In the pan on the end of the row, a deep pink squid was trying to lift the lid, which was bolted to only open a couple of inches.
“Right,” said the chef. “Hold her.”
“Just the hand,” I reiterated. “Just the hand.”