Kiss the Chef

The chalky hand pushed the lid off the steaming pot in a frenzied effort to escape. The lid, however, clattered to the kitchen floor and alerted Mary of the attempt. She came running in, armed with a metal spaghetti strainer.

"Back in the pot!" she exclaimed, bashing the strainer against the scrambling fingers. "Back in the pot!"

The hand gave up all hope and fell with a splash back into the scalding broth. Mary clanged the lid back on the pot and placed a heavy bound cookbook atop it to weigh it down.

That settled, she stepped into a frail pair of pink slippers and trotted down to the end of the driveway to her slanted mailbox, victim of one too many drive-by baseball battings. Awaiting her inside was a brown package. She checked the return address, which was given as Penderghast's Cereal Museum. She couldn't remember being affiliated with any such place. She was strictly an oatmeal girl herself. But it was addressed to her, no mistaking it.

She brought the package inside and laid it on the kitchen counter. She cut the twine which was tied around it with a pair of shears. The contents of the boiling pot was making a racket again and she bellowed at it to keep quiet. She stripped off the brown paper and took the lid off the box within. Inside was a large quantity of packing excelsior, of which she was allergic. Holding one hand over her mouth and nose, she dug through it with the other, keeping as safe a distance as possible. Her searching hand encountered nothing underneath the excelsior but more excelsior. She made a few passes, but it seemed to her that someone had sent her a package of nothing but packing material. What kind of a sick joke was this?

Irritably, she turned towards the stove and the pot with the noisily writhing thing inside.

"I said be quiet!" she snarled and viciously cranked up the gas jet.

Marigold Mary

Marigold Mary, quite contrary
Her earthenware filled with bones
Rocking her chair on the terrace
As the aching old floorboard groans

Her legs are varicose webs
Her toenails gnarled and grey
A droplet hangs from her nostril
On a cold St Valentine's Day

Her shovel is tarnished with rust
On second thought maybe it's blood
Someone leans out of the cupboard
And falls with a lumbering thud

She rushes inside like a shot
And packs them back in with a kick
She bolts the cupboard securely
Fastening it with a stick

Out in the garden her roses
Feast on the rich fertile soil
Made from the remnants of those
Departed from this mortal coil

Beautiful and Deadly...

In every small town, there is a sweet old lady, long bereft of her own family, who turns her attention towards the needy and the orphaned, the sick and the weak. This woman will bake pies until the sunrise, walk miles to deliver someone a carton of eggs, spray antiseptic mist on the smallest of abrasions and wipe away the thinnest tear with timeweathered hands.
Mary Gold was not this woman.
Mary Marguerite Goldmundson was the last in a line of would-be opportunists who had settled in this area long ago. Several generations back, when there was nothing here but dirt, no sound but the wind, no activity but the occasional bird falling from the sky of exhaustion or boredom (whichever cramped the wings first), Mary's great great afewmoregreats grandfather had come in search of his fortune. Gold. Aztec gold. Incan gold. Mayan gold. Maybe a little Visigoth gold. It didn't matter to Marshall Mundson. He had a vision of exceeding wealth, and it drove him to the far corners of the earth. In this case, the plot of land that would one day be known as Villa Sicko. In Mary's words, it was an heroic tale of bravery and visiondom. In most people's minds, it was more a case of 'where's grandpa? Oh, no, don't tell me you left the door open and now he's wandered off into the wild again'. It was somewhere in his immediate line that the 'Gold' began appearing in the family name. It was, apparently, the closest they ever came to the precious metal.
Generations came and went--there was a big game hunter who spent his time reconstructing jack rabbits to look like gargantuan werebeasts, a woman who claimed to have gone mountain climbing one afternoon with a statue of the virgin Mary, and a young man who claimed that the Holy Grail had been given to him by an Indian priestess, but when we put it to his lips, it contained hot soup, and he dropped it instinctively, causing the priestess and the grail to disappear instantly.
Mary, unlike her illustrious line, was a florist, and really a very good florist. Her home and land looked like a botanical garden. Even in the harshest weather, she could find a way to keep her flora thriving. But if her homestead was the garden of Eden, she was the serpent. Unlike the aforementioned sweet old maid, Mary was chronically nasty to people, and wholly unpleasant to be around. It was only out of desperation that Penny Detroit had called her in to handle the flowers at her husbands funeral, which is a story for another day.
Of course, rumors surrounded Mary, some up to and including that she had actually been responsible for the deaths of the townsfolk whose proceedings she had decorated, not to mention the wayfarer and the passerthrough. It was said that she used a very special kind of plant food to keep her garden as healthy as it was--human remains. None of this had ever been substantiated, understandably...these were only rumors...of the more...likely nature.