Evening Fry

A priest once told me that the lump on my hand was a ganglion, a fortress of fat besieged by health. At last it burst and the hand swelled like an old man's, shovel shaped and splayed. It was her black pan, butcher's meat, too many eggs; backed up on a plate like silage. It was her slight hands shaking, the constant poking with a bread knife, the endless journey to the first biscuit from the pack; a menace that caught our hearts and buttered them, teeth marks, crusty. Moreover, tomatoes, pulpy and bloodlet, burnt my wicked tongue, purged a shard of shame, dare I eat a box full bedraggled in juices and spitting at the angle of a chop kept? Caked at the start in the corner of the pan, beached in lard, over fried, sole fit, chewed in discontent, longing for more between the acceptance of juices; hope swallowed with brittle rashers, timbered and gathered. It was the thought, the deed, the plan, the wait and duty of it. Potatoes, eschonced in the pot, sullen, strewn; a flaky hand sliced them deftly, washed the starch off and raked them in. It was sausages, flame ripped, dashed, blackened and wedged on the barbs of the fork, heaved in with fried bread, salty with froth. It was puddings, sinewed and cut crooked, corpuscles of grizzle congealing the blood, jaws working the skin like the cud. Eggs like ignoble sea creatures, speckled and stiff, surviving on the rise and fall of breath, morphing into another gender or something to wonder, to chew on, to mention, once. Perhaps a bean to lubricate, to allow a channel of liberty but still reheated to a lump, a thankless sweetener to a morsel, not unlike news. Tea, besugared and welcome, a scald to erode stubborn detritus, a wash to emerge from. Between mouthfuls of talk we glided, sometimes low to the ground near silence, seldom scuttling to any real height. I suppose that was left for pipe and ***, in the latter end, when all offence was shut up tight and we had regard again; the smoke curled up and carried our souls, and mingled, indiscernible and flowed away.