Toronto night life

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Fried Green Tomatoes Recipe

My next-door neighbours establish a human os in their backyard. Let me rephrase. She believes she establish a human bone. They were putting up a fencing in their backyard. They’ve been excavation and shoveling and grading posts. I unloaded some boards to be a Mister-Rogers-kind-of-neighbor. And she was still talking about the human os she’d shown me the twenty-four hours before.

I was walking down the driveway, and she called me over to look at the bone. “Don’t you believe it's a human bone?” she asked.

I set my ft on it and rolled it around, inspecting each side. It’s about the size of a little child’s bone. I took my ft off it and said in jest, “You should name the authorities. State them you establish a human bone.”

We both stood over it, looking at it, concocting our ain beliefs about the bone.

“You really believe I should?” she asked. The whole scene had my neighbour talking in a high-pitched voice.

Now I’m not an expert on human bones. I’ve never put eyes on them. I saw a image of them the other nighttime on Despairing Housewives. Person cut that adult female up and set her in that trunk that floated to the top in some lake on the set of the show. So this was a first for me. Iodine could state it was a bone. Some sort of a bone.

If it were me, I’d pitch the thing in the trash. I wasn’t ready to name Cold Lawsuit and have got that blonde-headed biddy come up out to set us all under surveillance. Ask us twenty questions. “How long have got you lived adjacent door, Mr. Stofel?” Then she would look into my deadening life.

To prosecute something like this is to ask for too much play into your life. They’ll convey in a backhoe. Stopping Point off my driveway. Keep me from getting any work done with all the noise going on outside my window. It just do your backyard look like a graveyard. Then you acquire to distressing about the house. You’ll start hearing footfalls on the boards or a bosom beating beneath the floor boards like in that Edgar Allan Edgar Allen Poe short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Remember the story? The storyteller kills the old adult male because his pale bluish eye, like a vulture’s eye, is driving him insane. Everywhere he turns there’s that eye, until finally he can’t take it anymore. He ins his manner into the old man’s room each nighttime until he finally jumps on the old adult male who shrieks. The storyteller throws the mattress over him. Suffocating him. Waiting for his last heartbeat. It happens. Then he dismembers him, like that organic structure in Despairing Housewives. He raises the three boards of the flooring of the chamber. The old adult male is gone. Elation.

Then a knocking upon the door. Three police officer base at his door. A awful scream coming from his house have been reported. But the storyteller fearfulnesses nothing. He’s performed the perfect crime. He throws unfastened the house. Slings his weaponry into every room. They are satisfied that it was indeed the storyteller yelling in his sleep. The police force pulling up chairs and chat.

At first it's exhilarating for the narrator. He's getting away with murder. Then it acquires old. They will not travel away. And it isn’t because they are suspicious. They're not. Just tired. Just experience like talking. But this is when the bosom gets to beat beneath the three planks, up under the three policeman’s feet. But they cannot hear it, only the storyteller hears the sound of the bosom beating from beneath the three planks. He starts talking in a crazy, idiotic way—his voice stretch crescendos. But the bosom beats above the sound of his voice. Louder and louder. Until the adult male cannot base it any longer. And he draws up the boards and uncovers the old man’s corpse.

The storyteller shrieks, “Villains! dissemble no more! I acknowledge the deed!—tear up the planks! here, here!—It is the beating of his horrid heart!”

Maybe I’m taking my neighbor’s archeological excavation too far. But it got me to thinking about Edgar Allan Edgar Allen Poe and that zany story, and about how it bleeds into my story. I’m that way. Everything bleeds into a story for me. We are stories. You and I. Stories.

So, as I said, it got me to thinking about my ain heart. How it was hidden beneath the floor, inside this tegument and castanets that the Apostle Alice Paul names “the old man.” That old iniquitous nature inside.

I thought about how my bosom was the first thing to react to Supreme Being on that twenty-four hours in a 1,000-member church. And the wild thing is—the revivalist speaking that day—he heard my heart. It must have got been beating in his ears the manner the bosom beat in the ears of Poe’s narrator.

Louder and louder it thumped, as if a low-rider was sitting at the reddish visible light at the corner with the bass thumping against the moment. It beat in his ears until he couldn’t base it anymore, and the revivalist shrieked, “Someone here; your bosom is about to beat out of your chest. You necessitate to acquire up and come up down here to the communion table and give your beating bosom to Christ.” Iodine can retrieve his words like a mantra, even after twenty-three years. Word for word. True story.

And it freaked me out. I was new to all of this Christian church stuff. I went to Christian church as a little child, but I can’t state you anything about it. I can’t retrieve much before I was ten. But I can retrieve what that adult male said to me at the age of eighteen.

I could associate to him somewhere deep interior my soul, underneath the three boards of the chamber. My bosom beat. It pounded. Louder and louder. So I jumped up, went down to the altar, and shrieked, “I am the 1 with the beating heart. Me, this heart. It beats. I did it.”

Of course, we are all guilty. We killed the most cherished thing. The One thing. The One bosom that took its last beat here, only to come up back and beat inside everyone who listens. Louder and louder. And with each beat a new beginning for some mediocre psyche whose bosom have taken its last beat here, only to arrant his first ageless hello there.

● ● ●

My married woman told me Bonnie buried the os a couple of hebdomads ago. Put it back in the land behind her house. I figured that was the end of it. Then Spike Lee called this hebdomad and said, “Go to your backdoor, Bonnie have something for you.”

So I did as told. I went to the backdoor and Bonnie was walking across the private road we share. She had a handbasket with something inside. I could see right off that supper was mine. I even grinned. I just happened to be starving at the moment.

And she held out this handbasket with a good ole’ southern smiling and said, “We had some other barbecue ribs. It’s Lee’s secret recipe.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me! This volition be a feast. Thank you.”

She smiled and turned to traverse the driveway. And man, were they good! Succulent. I’d eat them every nighttime of the hebdomad and decease of case-hardened arteries. I wouldn’t care. I was so excited about receiving them that I even thought about becoming a Bo Bice fan.

Then I got to thinking about that os she establish in her backyard, the os I was telling you about a couple of hebdomads ago. Well, I got to thinking maybe they’d cooked up some secret formula all right. Secret meat that used to be on that os she found. You cognize it happened in that movie, Fried Green Tomatoes. They killed that man, chopped him up, made barbeque out of him, and Federal him to that Empire State Of The South detective, who told Big Saint George that it was the best barbecue he’d ever eaten, and asked him what his secret was. And Big Saint George smiled and said, “Thank you, suh, I’d have got to state the secret’s inch the sauce.”

And I was thinking, I trust they aren’t eating me a dead person.

The neighbours even establish a grave marker in the backyard to travel along with the bone. No lie. First came the bone, and then this grave marker appeared. This is where they said the os must’ve come up from. Said it may have got been a soldier in the Civil War. They had my attention. It was some sort of achromatic stone with a unsmooth texture. It had three initials on it—W.C.P. Iodine cognize because she had it leaning against the dorsum of her house and called me over to look at it. Sure enough, it was a grave marker. And certain enough, it could be a Confederate soldier. General Hood, the Confederate full general and full-time sot, took his work force across the Volunteer State River near Decatur on his manner to acquire all those male children killed in the Battle of Franklin. So it could be a Civil War man. Oregon it could be they are setting me up. Making me believe it was a Civil War man.

They could’ve bought that sedate marker at a pace sale. She’s large into pace gross sales anyway. She bought a butcher’s block at a pace sale today. I saw her tugging on it, trying to acquire it out of the dorsum of her truck. I just happened to be walking out the backdoor. I curse I don’t spy. Iodine ain’t A nosy neighbor, but like I said, she was trying to raise it out of the truck, and when I asked her if she needed aid she said, “Naw, I got it.” Then she said, “It’s A butcher’s block. Iodine bought it at a pace sale for $3.00.”

I was thinking, That’s Associate in Nursing atrocious large butcher’s block. She had both hands absorbing it and she was straining a spot to transport it in the backdoor. I was also thinking, What’s she going to cut up? A whole cow? Then I remembered the os and sedate marker. It was all approaching together. She’s Jeffery Dahmer’s sister or something. I pictured her in her kitchen with a detached arm on that butcher’s block. Freezer bags to the left of her and a knife in one hand, while the other manus on that arm’s hand. Then I remembered the ribs. I figured I’d just eaten person the other nighttime while I watched my NASCAR race. Maybe that’s why, when Iodine told them how good they were, she said, “Really?”

I said, “Oh, yeah. Best ribs I’ve ever sunk my dentition into.”

She said it again with this amusing expression on her face, she said, “Really? Well, its Lee’s secret recipe.”

(Yeah, right.)

Now I’m not accusing anybody of anything. But I state you what, if I catch her toting a organic structure bag in through the backdoor, I’m gonna travel over there and state her to allow me cognize when the ribs are ready. I’m like that Empire State Of The South investigator in that Fried Green Tomatoes movie—that was the best barbeque ribs I’ve ever eaten, and I’ll eat’em again. I don’t attention whose ribs they are. They some good feeding as long as Spike Lee can maintain his secret.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home