(Vegetables) Chapter Two: Popcorn May Be Tasty, But It’s Not So Good On Salads

When Morwen opened the door to the kitchen, a great waft of smoke came billowing out – setting the fire alarm in the hall screaming blue murder. Another figure materialised out of the smoke, frantically waving a tea-towel and coughing.

“Sorry!” the tea-towel wielding figure shrieked over the fire alarm’s wailing, as it flapped ineffectually at the ceiling with the towel.

Morwen took a deep breath, and dove into the kitchen, where she quickly located the source of the smoke – a frying pan left on the hot hob. Grabbing another tea towel, she calmly picked up the frying pan and, carefully checking out the window first and being sure not to knock it against her collection of daisies and carnivorous plants, defenestrated it.

She opened the back door as well, to let the smoke escape, before finally pushing the (still apologising and tea towel waving) figure in the hall to one side. Morwen picked up the long bamboo cane that was kept in the hall for this very reason, and gave a short, sharp stab to the fire alarm.

It gurgled, and stopped shrieking⁸.

Morwen’s ears were ringing.

“Rosa,” she sighed. “What have I told you about trying to cook when I’m not here?”

Rosa twisted the tea towel in her hands. It was slightly singed in places, some burn marks darker and younger than others.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was just trying to help get things started. I do want things to go well tonight! And my horoscope said that today was a day to revisit old challenges and that I was sure to succeed!”

Morwen frowned.

“Really?” she said.

Rosa put the tea towel into one hand and pulled her mobile phone out of her pocket with the other.

“My horoscope for today says: The Moon could see you keen to do something a bit different today, even if it is to worry your normal routine for the period. If we do this well and couple the timing with hard work, applications and no small little self-belief, you’re sure to have sown a vegetable,” she read from the screen.

“And that says to revisit old challenges and that you’re sure to succeed, is it?” said Morwen dubiously. “Just what exactly were you trying to sow a vegetable at?”

There was an inquisitive clucking from the back door.

“No chickens in the house!” called Morwen towards that general direction.

“I was trying to make a salad,” mumbled Rosa.

“Since when do you need a hot frying pan to make a salad?!”

“Since I saw on ‘Feasts with Friends’ that toasted nuts and seeds are really good on salads, and you toast them by putting them into a hot frying pan.”

Sure enough, now that the smoke had cleared in the kitchen, Morwen could see on the countertop a large plastic bowl containing full leaves of slightly wilted lettuce. They had mostly been pulled off the lettuce head, and showed signs of being hacked at with a knife.

The counter top was also covered in carrot and other vegetable peelings, and a salad dressing bottle lay on its side, slowly dripping its contents onto the kitchen floor.

“Why,” asked Morwen, “is there popcorn all over the floor?”

“Popcorn’s a seed, isn’t it?”

Morwen sighed and looked at her watch.

“It’s nearly twenty past six. They’ll be here at seven.”

Rosa twisted the tea towel some more.

Morwen shrugged out of her coat, hung it up, and put her handbag on the floor next to it.

“Right,” she said. “You clean. I’ll cook. And Rosa?”

Rosa had brightened up considerably.

“That bottle of white wine you’ve hidden in the airing cupboard? Go put it in the fridge. I’ve a feeling we’re going to need it.”

A scratching sound came from the kitchen, along with another inquisitive cluck.

“No chickens in the house!” called Morwen. And she went off to shoo the chickens out of the kitchen, not before one of them had made off with some of the veg peelings that were all over the floor.


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⁸ In a way slightly reminiscent of a telephone dropped into a well.