Copping Onions
At seven he chopped an onion into a fine mince and proclaimed dinner officially on.
Seeing him in the kitchen, at work on a meal, heartened Lance; weeks had passed since his diagnosis. A parade of anti-biotics and visits to specialists followed: childishly, he had feared that his lover would never rise from their bed again.
Maybe it was the stench of death, which seemed to surround him for most of the month. It had culminated in the death of his grandmother, whose funeral he was in the middle of planning.
But William had ascended like the sun and announced that Lance didn't know how to properly cook bangers and mash.
"Do your parents mind, my accompanying you?"
"Oh..no." Lance said in measure, staring at full-color eight by tens of pink, pine and plastic caskets.
His grandmother had been a measured woman; not truly, but quiet and reserved. Annette Evers had been a good woman who had married young but with haste, managed a family and become a saintly angel to the people in her hometown, which she had never left. Caution was a word that described her rightly.
He circled the pine casket's stock number.
"I can stay home, of course." William said, slipping two sausages into the frying pan. Lance's parents were staunch conservatives, embarrassed enough by their son's insistence upon being a professional wrestler.
"No. I don't want to be there alone."
William could understand Lance's sentiments. Death had stalked him for weeks.
It had set him to thinking...to examining his life. Performing an autopsy on his reasoning.
And there had to be more to life than dealing with political bullshit.
The pan, as though in spite, spat a droplet of hot fat onto his hand. Frowning, he rubbed the tiny pink mark, But he was so used to pain that it felt like a pinprick.
Lance's grandmother had lived a ripe ninety years; when he met her, she rhapsodized about bobbing her hair and accompanying Harold Lloyd and Mary Pickford films on her organ at the local theater. Her mind had been as sharp as a tack until the end.
William understood that his own mind would not experience the same fortune.
"Have you been feeding the reptiles?" He found himself asking, and Lance seemed hurt by the suggestion that he would forget their pets.
"Yes. Everyone's taken care of."
"Good." He turned the sausage, carefully plucking the fried onions from the pan and placing them in a shallow dish. His own grandmother had always maintained that they key to good Bangers And Mash was cooking the onions in butter first.
He smiled to himself; today, the first day that food seemed truly appealing to him, he returned to his own roots, roots that had been neglected.
His own grandmother lay alone in a grave in the rainy Highlands, without her husband. He had been lost in conflict.
"I think my sister will do the reading. She's a better orator." Lance smirked in self-deprecation, "Stick a microphone in my hand and I'm all thumbs."
William smiled in appreciation, as their microwave beeped. He quickly assembled the dish, passing Lance a plate.
He didn't even look up from his bill.
"I keep thinking," He said, suddenly, as William bit into a sausage, "That I don't want to die alone. But the truth is, I don't want to die at all. That's silly, isn't it?"
William's face filled with affection, "Love, you won't. Not as long as I'm alive."
But they understood, in the silence that followed, that life was no longer a promise ordained to them by unseen heavenly forces.
Like an onion, their cells could be divided. And though they could scream and carry on and bring tears to the eyes of another, little more could be done for a chopped onion; disconnected from life, it must be used or rot to the blue.
Justly, nothing more could be done for a life gone. Except to cook it up and see, at its conclusion, whose palate it might please.