Spiritual Cookery

Spirit and flesh have been boiling together. Years of smutch, and oily reduction, and each day a thin scum to be skimmed. A job for a Chef de Cuisine, a kitchen phantom who though never seen, has been keeping the suspension from separating, the pot from thickening too much with a pinch of this and that. I used to imagine that the flesh was a sort of gospel, bound strongly together by mind and ligaments, but each year there is a teaspoonful of loss that cannot be made up or accounted for.