The woman said into the phone: “When the knife nicked me, my husband was outside picking apples. I finished dinner after containing the blood. My husband came in with the apple basket. He always washes them straight away. He went to the counter. ‘There’s blood on the counter. What happened?’ I told him I cut myself doing the onions. He said, ‘But did you get any blood on the onions. And are you okay? But did you get any blood on the onions.’ I told him ‘I don’t know. I might have’ and he said, ‘Well, what did it look like? I’ve never seen blood on onions, although I’m sure that at some point in the history of cooking someone dropped some blood on the onions. Come to think of it, I’ve never actually seen blood on apples. It’s not something people actually think about.'”
“That’s true,” the friend said, who was trying to remember what blood must look like on onions.
“He checked my finger but the look on his face told me that he was still going through lists of food. Blood on a carrot, blood on potatoes, blood on tomatoes, which wouldn’t work, and blood on grapes would just make us think of wine, but human blood on cauliflower, now that would be something. I said, ‘Vanilla ice cream’ and I said ‘scrambled eggs’ and he said ‘tabasco sauce but really thick with the pepper’ and that’s when I told him to stop, that this was crazy talk and that I most likely did not get any blood on the onions, which I’d put into the fridge. I certainly wasn’t going to go back and check.”
“What were they for?”
“A tuna casserole. Onions, cheese, and so on. The children went right through it. But he watched every forkful. Sometimes he would glance at me. He would chew and look at me, as if saying am I swallowing you. Am I eating little bits of you. Which was a strange thought and a little interesting.”
