Chapter 7 - Grassglass Manor
A tall ladder. One grey shoe, dropping. A grey leg, following. The shoe, pressed against the ladder’s round. A creak. Another grey shoe drifting past, lighting like a stone pigeon on the ground beneath. A groan. Shoe by shoe. Rung by rung. Feet chiseled from earth-stone. Down the ladder’s length. At last, a short, leaden hop. The feet, together, dropping from the last rung. A crunch on a floor of crumbly leaves.
Mr. Grey reached the bottom of the ladder after a controlled descent and careful touchdown. He swiveled to Honeydew. She steadied the base with an idle hand. He offered one of the two picked apples, both sporting a single shiny spot of reflected moonlight. She took it and bit.
Mr. Grey rubbed his apple on a sleeve, simultaneously cleaning the fruit and dusting twig fragments from his robe. He said, “The wood’s different up there. The Wind blows colder. The soft bark gets these little bumps; like gooseflesh on trees.”
“Mmmm,” hummed Honeydew as she chewed. A sound of thinking, without the thought behind it.
After a silent tock, Mr. Grey added, “And I thought I saw light.”
Honeydew swallowed. “Like a building?”
“A glow, beyond that pumpkin copse.”
“Light means people.” Honeydew clicked thrice in quick succession. “It’s been eons since we saw a face.”
“Now, I only thought I saw the light,” Mr. Grey spoke in taciturn contrast to Honeydew’s budding hope. He kept hope from his face, and from his voice. His double-fast heartbeat, however, knew the truth.
Honeydew asked, “Was it a building?”
As if in answer they heard, rollicking through the woods, the tolling of a dinner bell. The bell wended by the thick trunks of soft wood. The bell blew curling tumbles through the dry needles. The bell came from the direction indicated by Mr. Grey. Honeydew’s eyes flared with the excitement Mr. Grey’s heart felt.
Honeydew tipped up the ladder’s base while Mr. Grey walked gradually down its length until they had it on the ground; the exact baker’s-hundredth time they’d performed this routine. They folded it with a wooden snap of the sides. They tied their suitcases and Mr. Grey’s coffin to the middle rungs. Mr. Grey picked up his top end, and Honeydew picked up her bottom. They marched and twisted their burden through the trees, over root and under moon, toward where Mr. Grey had seen the light. All while the dinner bell clanged.
Mr. Grey fixed his eyes ahead, even when passing beneath the branches drooping with pumpkins. Food never seemed to fall on its own in the wood, though there were occasional downpours of flaky leaves. They came to a spot where trees mingle their roots close together. They angled their ladder through without so much as a scrape of the trunks’ baby skin.
From the back of the ladder, Honeydew spoke up between crunches on her apple. “About time we found something new. CRUNCH It’s been the same tree cluster three hundred times over. CRUNCH”
Mr. Grey said, “At least we haven’t wanted food.”
“You said that last time we climbed. CRUNCH”
“Sorry. I just want to recognize the harvesters’ valuable gift.”
“I’ll just be glad with a scenic change. THUMP” Mr. Grey recognized this last sound as an apple core hitting a root. “I just want someone to chat with. I’d almost take that diegeonary at this point. CRUNCH”
Mr. Grey looked back at her. This time the crunch came from Honeydew stepping through a tall pile of twigs. The turn cost Mr. grey. He stumbled on the gnarled root of a twisted tree. He caught his balance by holding on to the ladder. Honeydew gave a startled click, but held her end. Mr. Grey said, “Some company would be nice.”
They came around a final cluster of trunks and dense sedge. They saw the source of the light Mr. Grey had glimpsed from the ladder’s peak.
Under the moon’s glow, a mansion grew in an open field.
The mansion’s walls had no ill angle. They were terracotta, and they curved and bent like fatty skin. Its grassglass windows spread over the smooth walls in wide and tall latticed sheets, like translucent layers of shamrock frosting on carrot cake. The mansion had neither thatch nor shingle nor shake for roofing. Instead it sported a mad pile of ceramic lids, all in a jumble, splattered with the salt-and-pepper droppings of crows, owls, and ravens. Skylights of the same shamrock glass sheeting made little rectangles in the otherwise-dense pile. Chiminea-style oven flues sprouted up through the pot lids as well, like weeds growing from a rocky cairn. Cobalt cooking smoke drizzled up from every chimney. Working in unison, they made a constant kitchen fire thrum in the weed-strewn field around the manor, and produced the testosterone musk of a barbeque.
Mr. Grey and Honeydew arrived just in time to watch the dinner bell clang out a final, dolorous note. Just in time to see the round front door - with a round knob handle at its center - close with an earthenware scrape.
They’d both paused unconsciously at the manor’s prospect. Honeydew clicked and said, “Looks like someone’s home.” She hastened Mr. Grey forward from the back of the ladder.
Mr. Grey’s legs pushed through the tall grass at their regular pace. He said, “I think we’ve been fortunate so far.”
“How do you figure?”
“No run-in with the dragon. Or any wolves or bears or boars.”
“We’ve spent each night under a ladder. Under the wild trees. Not a roof over our heads since the barn.”
“The air’s fresh. And it’s been scenic.”
“Sure. If the scene you like is: endless moonlight, endless forest, weird animals noises around the ladder-tent. Nice for a visit, not an extended stay.”
A sudden shrill scream interrupted her. They glanced around the clearing, but not with any show of fear. They’d been through this routine a baker’s-thousand times. Honeydew pointed to one of the strange vegetable statues dotting the weedy yard; a stone carrot jutting up from the grass. An owl - the source of scream - gulped visibly as it swallowed its supper. It stared back at them, hooed once, and flew away.
Honeydew pushed the ladder and the conversation forward again. “Just some variety. That’s all I’m after,” she said. “Some new food. Corn and pumpkins and apples lose their flavor when you’ve eaten nothing else for epochs.”
Mr. Grey said, “The smell suggests we’re in for meat. Do you think they’d take treasure?”
“Maybe they’re a family of famous chefs. Or food critics. Imagine the stories they’ll have.”
“Then again, if they’ve got a whole mansion they’re probably not short on funds. Perhaps we can pay in song?”
Mr. Grey bumped their ladder on a knee-high wall of rocks, hidden in the tall weeds. The impact shuddered along the ladder and up the arms of Mr. Grey and Honeydew. A section of the loose rock tumbled, clattered, thudded off the wall. Mr. Grey glanced back to make sure their luggage remained safely trussed. Then he climbed the wall and set back the fallen stones. Honeydew held her peace, but her shiny eyes fixed on the manor door. When Mr. Grey took his end back up and stepped forward once more, they held the ladder higher.
Mr. Grey now searched for other obstacles or small ditches hidden in the overgrowth. He said, “It’s possible Jodee also laid over in this house. She might be inside this very moment. I wonder, should I grab the blank visas?”
Honeydew asked, “How do you picture that spinning out?”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s say there’s small odds she’s inside. Let’s say we stand those odds. Let’s say you find Jodee. What’ll you do? Make her file the document? Say, ‘By the way, you have to come back to Starharbor’?”
“Something like that…”
“If she says no?”
Mr. Grey thought. He felt his ticker roll through a large fraction of its face. He came to a watercress statue, lying toppled in the briar, and made a show of finding a careful path around. His face wore its usual stoic look. The crescent moon’s threadbare spotlight made his face harder to read than usual, but behind the grey mask, the grey mind pondered. Hard. Behind the grey chest, the grey heart drummed.
Just as Mr. Grey was about to say he didn’t know what he’d do - that they’d cross the Coats Bridge when they came to it - Honeydew changed the topic. “I’d also like a bath,” she said as she lifted their ladder over the fallen watercress. “This place should have one, right?”
“It looks opulent.”
“It’s a manor. There’s got to be modern hygiene facilities. And a soft bed. I’m tired of sleeping on roots and dirt; waking up sweaty and ill-rested.”
“Haven’t you grown accustomed? We’ve been roughing it a while through Dreamland’s dales, vales, and glades.”
“I can tolerate the terrain. But my feet are sore. They’re sick and tired of the same soil, over and over again.”
Mr. Grey, with his free left hand, pinched his chin. “I wouldn’t mind a nice armchair.”
“Somewhere to put your feet up!”
“Plus, we might ask for directions.”
“Exactly.”
“And even if she’s not here, we might learn the likeliest place Jodee would go.”
Honeydew produced a verbal eye-roll with her click. “Sure, we can ask.”
They reached the manor porch. Mr. Grey left the ladder with Honeydew, and mounted the baked earth steps. He inspected the round front door, with its knob handle. He inspected the dinner bell, an upturned pot dangling from a leather strap.
He looked back at Honeydew as she went to untie their luggage. Mr. Grey asked, “Should I knock, or ring the bell?”
Before Honeydew could answer, the door scraped open.
A stately grandfather ticker in the mansion foyer formally announced the supper hinted at by the porch bell. Mr. Grey and Honeydew stepped into the grand entry room. They heard the old timepiece toll out the first sound in its sequence; not the traditional bong of a swinging metal pendulum, nor the less-traditional-though-recognized twitter of a bird. The old ticker kept time with a crack like knuckles. Mr. Grey’s eyes whisked in the direction of the sound, and saw the patronly arranger of tocks. Metal and glass made up the heavy body and see-through front of the grandfather ticker. Its inner gearworks and its pendulum, however, were bone. All bone. Mr. Grey saw the pendulum specifically - a whole femur of unknowable origin - begin a crawling swing towards the next toll. Several moments would pass before it struck again.
Mr. Grey peeled his eyes off the encased femur. He looked over the rest of the foyer. The end tables, and the doors leading to closets and hallways, and the walls, and the twin stairs slithering up from a central landing across the way, and the banisters that slithered up with them; all these were made of the same materials as the house and the ticker. Metal and bone and glass and stone and ceramic appeared in post-modern abundance. But Mr. Grey’s eyes couldn’t find an atom of wood. A peculiar architecture, thought Mr. Grey, given the locale. A plush woolen rug covered the foyer floor. It had a pattern like farmland plots seen from an aerial view.
The meat smell was heavier inside than outside. So was the kiln rumble they’d heard coming off the chimneys. Inside the manor it sounded somehow threatening, like furnace-breath in the bowels of a crematorium.
Another grandfather ticker joint pop interrupted Mr. Grey’s perusal. He glanced at Honeydew and saw she’d been similarly jolted. Mr. Grey cleared his throat dryly and said, “Hello? Pardon us, the door was open.”
They waited a moment. The grandfather ticker cracked. Honeydew said, “Maybe I was wrong. About them being home.”
“They might have just gone,” agreed Mr. Grey.
“Chances are the front door’s always swinging open and shut. Must be loose on its hinges.”
“It’d be rude to wait around.”
They crossed the threshold to leave, Mr. Grey grabbed the round door handle to close the manor.
The handle popped off in his hand.
Mr. Grey looked from the door, to the knob in his hand, to Honeydew. Honeydew looked from Mr. Grey, to the knob, to the door. Mr. Grey tried inserting the round handle back into its socket. It wouldn’t fit. He said, “We can’t just leave it this way.”
“Leave it on the stoop.”
“That seems wrong.”
“Why? Clearly it was loose.”
“That’s like entering, and breaking, and running away.”
“Your suggestion?”
Mr. Grey called into the house again, and received no answer. He thought of doing as Honeydew said; leaving the handle on the step and leaving the odd house. But he thought, too, of how disappointed he’d have been if - on returning to his workers’ prison room at the eve of a long day of pencil pushery - he found his own door handle broken. He also imagined Jodee, potentially hiding, somewhere inside the mansion.
“Surely somebody’s home with all those smoking chimneys,” Mr. Grey reasoned. He tightened his shawl and hefted his violin coffin. “Let’s step up the stairs and call behind a few doors. If we can’t find anyone, we’ll leave the handle here.”
Mr. Grey and Honeydew stepped back into the manor and across the farmland carpet, while the grandfather ticker pop-tocked another joint. Upon entering the empty mansion, as mandated by King’s Law - and Queen’s also, Mr. Grey supposed - the loose door swung shut behind them.
They ascended the curving left stair leading to the second story and passed along a dozen curving corners in the hall. Their footsteps made a pewter tapping sound against the uncarpeted floor. Through the grassglass windows and skylights, the moon fell dimly. It lay over the walls and floors like pond scum. Honeydew took a candle from her suitcase and had Mr. Grey light it with a quick enchantment. He played softly; the notes were inaudible beneath the constant kiln hum.
The new light made plain a peculiar piece of decor. Along their current hallway, across from the windows and hanging on the wall between two ceramic room doors, Mr. Grey and Honeydew saw a row of portraits. Honeydew held the candle up to one. It seemed to be a cut of square leather behind glass and a metal frame. All the framed skins were family portraits, which wasn’t so odd. The odd part was that, instead of people, every one of the painted pieces of leather showed a vegetable. Vegetables dressed up like people, situated like people; but biologically, crops. In one portrait - wearing a burgundy bathrobe, reclining in a high back armchair of velvet, reading a leather bound grimoire before roaring brick fireplace - an arugula made itself cozy. In another a pretty young emerald bean in an emerald dress-robe with silver buttons sat stiffly in a bone chair. A bowl of blotchy cheeses lay on a bone-table beside her, and a giant cricket slept at her glass-slipper-shod feet.
Mr. Grey decided that any door was as good as any other. He reached up to knock on the one to the left of the arugula portrait. It opened with a creaky scrape just as he reached to knock; and just as the grandfather-ticker back in the foyer cracked another knuckle. Mr. Grey hesitated with his own knuckles raised. He said, “Pardon, anyone home?” No answer. He turned to Honeydew. “Every door in this house must be loose.”
“Must be,” she answered. But the hesitant furrow in her brow contradicted her, as though adding, “Must it though… reallytruly?”
She raised her candle and they stepped into the room.
“This manor’s got a wonky layout,” said Honeydew. “A kitchen on the second story?”
Mr. Grey said, “Maybe there’s multiple. It’s a big house. It would explain all the chimneys.”
The two walked through a dense smog of meat odor, past counters piled with sausages, and loins, and ribs, and steaks, and briskets, and necks. Cut after cut after cut, piled high on every counter. Steamy meats overflowed from pans fresh off the stove.
Honeydew said, “Bet they’ve got a scurvy problem.”
“At least there’s variety,” said Mr. Grey. He examined a shank swaying on a giant hook.
“Is there?”
“Look at all the different cuts.”
“It’s- it’s strange meat. It’s not fish or fowl. It’s not lamb, and it’s not goat. It’s not pork, or beef, and I’ve tried horsemeat too, and it’s not that. And it’s not any combination of those animals either.”
“Venison, perhaps? Or wolf meat, or bear? This is a forest.”
They heard a sudden squelch back beyond the kitchen door. Mr. Grey called out. “Hello? We don’t mean to intrude,” He listened; he heard only the ever-present oven rumble. He and Honeydew stepped back into the hallway. They saw no one, either by light of candle or mossy moon.
Honeydew said. “Maybe… We should go. Clearly that food’s fresh. Whoever’s made dinner won’t want wanderers in their kitchen.”
Mr. Grey nodded. He swallowed dryly. He looked left. Then right. He asked,” Do you remember; which way did we turn last?”
“A right I think.”
The candle flickered nervously as they tiptoed past the family pictures. From directly outside the kitchen they reversed their turns easily. But something about the new glow of the candle in hallways they’d crossed under only mildewy moonlight; something about the portraits of celery and leeks and lemongrass, seen under new light; something about the unseen furnace hum, or the tap of their shoes on the ceramic floor, or the squishing steps they seemed to hear around every corner just before or just behind them; something about the heady meat smell; something among these sensations left them discombobulated. Somewhere, they took a wrong turn.
The grandfather ticker had tolled through a centipede’s worth of joint cracks, when Mr. Grey and Honeydew came to a large arch at the end of a long hall with no other doors. They stepped below it. They saw a conservatory. The walls and ceiling were all grassglass and iron lattice. The moon’s aged copper patina lay strong over a collection of statues: broccoli, asparagus, lettuce, artichokes. The stone vegetables looked ripe, almost more natural than Mr. Grey himself.
Around the bases of the statues; dangling from nets in the ceiling, and stacked into piles on the walls; soaking in the moonlight and, now, the candlelight; they saw a baker’s-dozen giant pods. Like the pods of poppy seeds, but big as coal stoves. The membranous skin of the pods looked translucent, but a heavy humid quality of the conservatory air left foggy condensation over their surfaces. Mr. Grey and Honeydew couldn’t see what grew inside.
When that distant, elderly ticker pounced on them with yet another bone-bong, it took both by surprise. Honeydew whirled at the nearest pod and brandished her shoulders. Mr. Grey said, “I think we made a wrong turn.”
Honeydew darted her eyes from pod to pod. She said, “We shouldn’t have made any. Did that tumor just move?!”
“I don’t think so. They look harmless.”
“What’s inside? I wish I still had that stick.”
“I don’t think there’s cause for alarm. Just- cultural divergence. From the Starharbor standard.”
“We haven’t seen one person since we entered. Just loads of produce.”
“Farmers, perhaps?”
“Of all crops?” asked Honeydew. She leaned away from the nearest pod, back toward the archway. “And why’s it so humid?”
Mr. Grey saw Honeydew flicking her eyes back and forth between himself and the nearest pod. He craned and searched for a gardener. The room seemed empty as the rest of the house. He loosened his anchor shawl and swallowed. Finally, Mr. Grey stepped forward. With a polite rubbing motion, like a butler polishing good China, he wiped the condensation from one membrane with his shawl.
The person they saw inside looked something like a shrimp suspended in a rosewater. A fully grown, flabby, hairless human. Curled into the fetal position. No mouth, nose, or eyes. An umbilical of ropey, veiny tissue linked the person to the base of the pod. As Mr. Grey twitched his hand back, the membrane warbled. The brine swished ever so little from the motion. The person inside twisted slowly.
“Let’s leave now,” said Honeydew.
Mr. Grey nodded. They backpedaled toward the conservatory entry. Their eyes followed the slow rotation of the pod-person. It made no other motion, and they couldn’t call it ‘existing’ for certain. When they got out from under the room’s verdant moonlight, Honeydew bent her knees to sprint, and Mr. Grey prepared a triple-rate footpace. They swiveled around.
A cabbage man wearing a diamond-patterned cardigan robe stood in the hallway on three stumpy root-legs. He came up to their waists. When the light of Honeydew’s candle fell over the cabbage, he shirked from the pair. Honeydew hunched and backpedaled. Mr. Grey reeled at a 30-degree angle.
A cricket the size of a terrier jumped into the open space between the parties. It emitted a chirrupy growl at Honeydew. The cabbage held it back on a short leather leash.
The vegetable person said, in a nervous, rustling-plant voice, “Alas, thieves. Come to burgle the manor?” He shook the hand holding the leash. The cricket dog chirped and hopped at them.
Honeydew clicked in a way expressing fear, denial, and threat, all at once. Mr. Grey resumed regular posture. His face went unchanged. This seemed to unnerve the cabbage. It shook the leash again and made the cricket jump. Mr. Grey held out the front-door knob, and said, “We- We didn’t mean to interrupt. The door was open. This came off. We’re sorry.”
The little vegetable’s leaves sagged and he let out a fresh, squeaky sigh. The cabbage pulled the leash back, looked behind him, and yelled. “It’s alright, they’re not bandits. But - faerie godmothers! - who left the front door open?”
A family of other vegetables - all clothed in matching, diamond-pattern cardigan robes, and all walking on rooty little legs - joined the cabbage. An old onion of many layers stood at the host’s front, followed by a decaying emerald pepper and moldy ruby pepper, a flaking garlic, a trio of fresh eggplants, a gnarled and knobby ginger root, and - at the very back - a sweet, shy potato. The potato giggled, and hid behind the ginger’s sleeve.
Honeydew caught her voice and un-crouched as the family came into sight. She glanced back at the pods in the conservatory and said, “We won’t keep you from… We were just leaving.”
She began to slink along the ceramic wall, past the family. Mr. Grey followed. The cabbage held up a leafy hand to stop them and pointed at Mr. Grey’s violin. He said, “You’re an enchanter.”
Mr. Grey said, “I moonlight.”
The distant grandfather ticker chimed one final time; Mr. Grey knew it was final, because instead of a single joint pop, he heard a bone crash like a full skeleton falling to pieces. The cabbage said, “And that’s dinner. Why don’t you stay? We’d love to hear you play for supper.”
“Gah, gah, gah! These burglars were nothing.” The old onion spoke in a weepy voice. He banged his fist for emphasis against a suspicious leather tablecloth.
“Grandfather,” said the cabbage with a placating wave of his leafy hand. “They don’t want to hear your stories.”
“Back when the queen was in charge, this house saw locusts. A whole hoard!”
“It was barely a swarm.”
“Arrayed in battle formation, they swooped down the flues. That was why we had the grates installed at the tippy-top. That was how we lost our wee little turnip too. She’d be as old as son and missus now,” said the onion, with a wave at the two aging peppers. “Aye, those were happier-ever-after epochs.”
The vegetable family ring sitting at the round sandstone table bowed their heads and fell silent. Mr. Grey and Honeydew joined them. While the family thought of their lost turnip, Mr. Grey and Honeydew looked at their empty pewter plates. They wondered about supper.
The cabbage - a third generation member of the family, and its spokesman by unspoken agreement - broke the silence. He said, “Poor manners of ours, to drag visitors through our family’s days of yore. Such dreadful hosting.”
“Not at all,” said Mr. Grey evenly. “It sounds like a sad event.”
“‘Tis so,” said the old onion. “But I always say: eat what one can, suffer what one must, don’t let any shoemakers near your eyes.”
“Supper should be a happy time,” said the cabbage. “Especially for the company. A time for making merry.”
“A time for growing,” said all three of the eggplants in unison.
“With a funny or a spooky story,” said the sweet little potato with a giggle.
The flaking garlic added, “A warm cup. Something thick and dark and ruddy on the porch.”
“Tucking into the flowerbed once you’re full,” yawned the knobby root of ginger.
“But,” said the cabbage, returning the conversation to Mr. Grey and Honeydew, “not before a little trade. The fiddler’s song, in exchange for supper.”
“I’m happy to play a tiny piece,” said Mr. Grey. He glanced at the empty plates set before the assembly. “But to be honest, I’m not hungry.”
“We had appl- We dined in the woods,” added Honeydew.
The cabbage said, “Fiddlesticks! You’re guests in Grassglass Manor. If you’re going to play, we’re going to feed you,” The rest of the vegetables rustled their agreement.
A round staff door across from Mr. Grey rolled open with the usual scrape, this time not on its own. A mushroom servant entered the dining room. He wore a clean, pressed, ebony-and-ivory cardigan-robe, with shiny silver buttons running all the way up to his gills. On his flat russula head, he balanced a wide, covered, ceramic serving-dish.
A troop of other mushroom servants followed into the dining hall behind the head waiter. All carried dishes of concealed food, or tall pewter cups of sloshing drink. Not all were russula; there were plain old porcinis, and champignons, and amanita, and a bundle of enoki having a rough time balancing its own dish. The mushroom crew circled countertockwise around the curving wall until they formed an outer ring behind the diners. They swooped in suddenly; Mr. Grey saw Honeydew sit up tense and stiff on her upside-down-pot chair. The servants slid the covered platters and trays full of tall cups onto the shiny leather table-covering. Some of the mushrooms darted quickly back through the staff door once the table had been set. The head butler russula and three portabella valets remained to serve.
Mr. Grey and Honeydew stared hard at the covered dishes set before them, then at their hosts. None of the vegetables lifted their dish, but all the vegetables wore ravenous looks, as if to see through the pewter to the meal inside. The cabbage turned to Mr. Grey. “Now young man - hahaha - I think you must enchant. Time to earn your fayre.”
Mr. Grey turned his head through a stony arc over the expectant comestibles. He said, “A shorter performance, would that do? It’s just, we’ve got so far to travel.”
“We want to see Dreamland,” said Honeydew.
“And we’re looking for that girl I told you about. Since she’s not here-”
The three eggplants chorused together. “But the woods are so dark and so drear.”
The cabbage said, “Don’t you want to eat? To dive roots-first into a soft compost-chair? To relax?”
Mr. Grey said, “A rest would be nice.”
“We’re not hungry for food of this kind,” said Honeydew with a firm click.
“She only means we prefer beans. That’s all. No offense intended.”
“I’ve a mind on that though,” said the garlic suddenly, and he leaned forward on his pot. “How differs a bean from any other viand?”
“By texture and taste,” said Honeydew. “And source, and-”
“But doesn’t it all spring from the same source? Beans and corn, flowers and animals. They all stem from the same soil by one degree or another. Everything’s food for something. Even the dirt, which the worms swallow by the bucket every eon.”
“Dearest Uncle,” said the ginger root. She set her elbows on the leather and rested her knobby chin lazily. “How you ramble. Not every supper needs to be theological.”
“‘Tis it not so though? It all comes apart and together in the dirt. Suppose I took an axe, and dismembered an animal.”
“Uncle! No butcher’s talk at table.”
“And suppose,” went on the flaking garlic, “I tossed all the animal’s parts in the compost heap. Well? Don’t they become whole again? Don’t they decompose and join in the pile?”
Mr. Grey checked his ticker; his knuckles pressed hard against the case. Without thinking he said, “Well, the night grows long.”
The vegetables, one and all, laughed. As if he’d said some clever, never-before-heard joke. The cabbage wiped his eyes, and said, “Too true sire. Well then, play for us.”
The vegetables, one and all, stared at him. Their looks were pleading. Even the grouchy onion and the devil’s-advocating garlic looked excited. Mr. Grey placed his ticker back in its pocket, and slid his pot chair away from the table. The cricket terrier had been sitting behind him, unbeknownst to Mr. Grey. It chirruped loud and angry at him. Honeydew jumped and bumped the table, making the ceramic dishes clatter. The cricket, however, only continued to hum low, and began stalking tockwise round the table.
Mr. Grey walked to the wall and a curved stone end-table where he’d left his coffin and violin. He’d already tuned the instrument, but he untightened and tightened the strings anyway. The sweet little potato suddenly said, “Butler! You forgot the cutlery again.”
The russula made a show of having forgotten that part of the meal, scratching at his cap. When the potato ran up to him he broke into a smile. He held out a tray of organized forks and spoons and knives for carving. The potato girl took the tray. She ran around the table - counter to the cricket dog - setting the silverware by each covered dish.
Mr. Grey paused to watch the process. The cabbage waved a hand impatiently and said, “Well go on musician; play!”
So Mr. Grey played. Not his best, but not his worst either. He played a rural, hillbilly jig, and the vegetables hopped up and down on their seats. Mr. Grey saw sappy, emerald drool spilling from the three eggplants mouths. They glanced imploringly between the cabbage and their covered plates. The cabbage clapped his hands as he bobbed to Mr. Grey’s tune. He said, “Here’s to family, and friends, and another epoch’s healthy crop!”
“Hear hear!” cried the rest of the vegetables. The head butler swooped in. He went and stood politely between the emerald pepper and Honeydew. He reached a proper arm out to the handle atop the pepper’s cover platter. With a swift, smooth tug, the butler pulled back the lid.
On the emerald pepper’s dish lay the basted, greasy, golden-baked head of a pod person. The moment this body part was revealed, the pepper darted at it. He carved and stuck at the crispy-skinned pate with knife and fork.
Honeydew tried to push back, tried to run. But the little sweet spud still roaming around ran up to her, and gave a childish scolding. “Come now miss Honeydew! Your posture’s not at all right.” The potato pushed a correcting hand into the base of Honeydew’s spine. Honeydew did not relax a muscle, but she did resume her seat at the potato’s prompting. The golden-lily eyes of her robe seemed to twitch, and she shuddered with pent-up energy.
All the while, Mr. Grey fiddled.
The butler moved next to the ruby pepper’s platter. He pulled the lid back to reveal a deep-fried pile of fingers and toes, twenty in total. Then came the garlic’s dish, then the cabbage’s, then the onion’s. As each earthenware top came swooshing off its plate, some other part of a person was revealed. Blood-eagled ribs, lacquered in barbeque sauce. The single, shiny hill of a boiled buttock. The cabbage ate the liver, with a side of kidney stones, and a nice O-negative. The eggplants had sausages.
All the while, Mr. Grey fiddled.
Still the vegetables bounced with Mr. Grey’s jig. Now that the dishes had come to light, however, they threw themselves at the meal as well. They dove in, slavering, and chewing, and bouncing. They abandoned decorum. The butler made his way around the ring, coming closer and closer to Mr. Grey and Honeydew’s plates. Mr. Grey could only watch. He fiddled faster, and faster, and faster. The butler approached his dish.
And while Mr. Grey fiddled, and came towards the end of his jig, and reached a sawing finale of notes, the russula-butler reached his dish. He grabbed the lids of both his dish and Honeydew’s at the same time. With a swish, he revealed their food.
Two piles of plain, ordinary, Starharbor beans.
Honeydew sighed and sagged. She nearly collapsed against the tablecloth, but stopped herself short of that suspicious leather. Mr. Grey let out his held air in a long breath through his nose; let it soar off into the hollow house-halls with the last flurry of his enchantment.
Mr. Grey set his violin back in its coffin. He turned and shared a glance with Honeydew. Neither felt hungry. Mr. Grey thought of making their excuses one last time. But when he looked toward the round room’s rounder door, the cricket dog had taken up a post there. It sat, and stared at Mr. Grey, and chirrup-growled.
The cabbage swallowed loudly. “What are you waiting for? Dig in, sir.”