"Moveable Feast" by Christopher Schaeffer
There is basil outside, and basil in the fridge besides, wilted, but still for your purposes perfectly fine. Grind the little arrowhead between your teeth, the sting and balm settling on your tongue and in the dark corners of your breath. Make no eye contact. Let the leaves like velvet amass in your fist, the scent on your palms and on your stained fingertips for days.
A crescent of onion paper, curled, langours vain and defiant on the garage floor. “Someone” it taunts “has been peeling onions in the middle of your fucking garage.” Textured Vegetable Destrudo, a silent Brooklyn accent. “It wasn’t you and it sure as hell wasn’t anyone you know.” An ant, matte black, clambers over the curve of its ridge, finds tenuous purchase on the brown grooves of its skin. “And how does that make you feel?”
Take your big knives, your little knives with toothy edges, your humble, shark-shaped middling knives, chop the basil in meaty clumps, pile the offering in bowls, on plates, and when those run out, on the counter and spilling onto the floor, crawling over wood-panel siding, creeping into the high spice cup-boards. Breathe in the flag of this invisible annexation, nearly faint (nearly) at the spicy reek of the green stains on your hands and butcher’s apron. Begin to make plans. Yeah. We’ll put it on pizzas. Pastas, sandwiches, that’ll be good, marinate it with some chicken, some pineapple juice, in fact bring some birds in right now and start lopping heads, plucking feathers. Tonight you will leave the question unanswered, you will snooze thoughtless under a verdant coverlet.
In your dreams, the basil will hold your hand, smudge its sweet and bitter cologne all over your sleeves, its crispness will fill your throat like pesto, your nose, your entire body. It will edit out your question marks, shrivel in the heat of the oil and lay its ghost like a shroud over the kitchen, over all of your doubts. Sometimes, though, the flutter of your eyelids gives you away, you awake on the cool of the garage floor among the ants and empties, drunk and bewildered, knowing what you are.
An onion without its skin.
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