Playing Spoons
Fiction
It began — as far as I recall — one evening over a bowl of peaches; the tinned variety that comes sliced in sweet, clear syrup, reminding me as a boy of little lifeless goldfish.
Dessert was called pudding when served at my mother’s table, and often in those days it would come from a can and require the application of cutlery — a spoon back then, rather than the more contemporary fork. I liked those little dead goldfish far more than the other kind of peach that came whole from the greengrocer, wrapped in mold-like overcoats, and I liked them, even more, when they arrived with a dressing of custard or evaporated milk on the warmer days of summer. But there was something about that flash of Sheffield stainless steel in the syrupy depths that left me wary.
The opulence of the Corn Flake and the Sugar Puff remained a thing of televisual myth at our breakfast table, where sweet, blackening bananas in evap, or thick grey porridge scraped in lumps from the pot were more common. I’d skulk from my bed and down the stairs each morning wondering which it might be, but always there they were — a clutch of those untrustworthy stainless scoops left jangling beside the marmalade. On their back, your face made a bulbous clown with an enormous nose. In the front, your head upside-down in an overturned room.
Bad behavior at the table would land me a clip around the ear from my long-armed father, but the blatant mockery of those spoons somehow went unpunished, unnoticed, and unmentioned.
That was not the sort of thing I’d put up with if I had my way, and when the day finally came for me to move from my parent's home to my own, I knew from then on I’d be calling the shots.
Without a moment’s delay, once the cutlery arrived from the reception with the other wedding gifts, I lined each piece up on the kitchen counter and laid down the ground rules for respectable behavior under this new regime. I urged each implement to look for example to the practical fork and the purposeful steak knife but hardly had we dished out the leftover trifle when I caught a mischievous tea-spoon clinging to a dollop of cream and forcing my new bride to batter the thing off the edge of her bowl in a racket of frustrated clangs. Not one for second chances, I immediately adopted a zero-tolerance stance, and though my dear wife sometimes hunts through drawer after drawer in fruitless exasperation, I feel obliged — as any husband would — to protect her from the mischievous malevolence of those lurid ladles.
No more trouble from the top drawer traitors.
Not where I’ve put them.
Merton Barracks lives in a state of bewildered enlightenment as he gradually unpacks the contents of his subconscious baggage.
Don’t expect to find a predictable or obvious genre in his fiction. It goes where it goes and says what it says, but the real story will often be hidden behind the words and between the lines.
Often published at The Lark, but sometimes just at home. Come take a look and see where it brings you.
