A Meal To Prove You Exist

Pour some olive oil in the pan.
And chopped garlic and onions.
And the turmeric – the one her parents gifted you once they got back from Greece.
And the cayenne pepper she never allowed you to use.
Pour four peeled tomatoes – fresh would be better but canned can be good too.
And the last strand of hair you just found by the bathtub.
Let the broth boil for a bit.
Then go fetch the sock, the last sock she’d forgotten when you split.
Put it in the sauce with some sausage and some heart of palm.

Prepare the rice. Clean it in bowls of water until the starch is gone – as gone as her – and the water
gets clearer.
Put the rice in the cooker. Remember it’s one and a half the volume of rice in water.
As the rougail boils, and the rice is cooking, you can go sock diving.

And here’s the last part – the crazy part. Go pick up the cat. The red-haired devil she did not care for
in her retreat.
You could slit its furry throat over the boiling pot is all I’m saying.
But be wary. Once you’ve killed the damn beast, who’ll ever know you exist?

Basile Lebret was the first French writer to do a sign-in at StokerCon for the release of his first book Welcome to Valenton, courtesy of Carnage House. His work includes over thirty publications in the US, the UK, France or Canada. The most recent: Dark Tales from the Outside by WATG Press, Male Pattern Violence by CultureCultLit, The Anthropocene Epic by Beyond the Stars Press and Squirm Books' Skin Deep. Soon in Psychogeography of Issels by Insurgent Press. Find him on any network: @evoripclaw