It’s the soft groan of someone dreaming in her sleep.

 

 And Chef Assassin falls backward, both hands dripping. The knife left behind, jutting straight up from the flower’s red center—until the dropped skirts flutter, lower, sift down to hide the mess. The Baroness drops the first paper plate, burdened with meat. The flower closing. The Earl of Slander springs to his feet, and he’s off her. We, we’re all standing back. Staring. Listening.

 

 Something needs to happen.

 

 Something needs to happen.

 

 Then, one, two, three, four, somewhere else, Saint Gut-Free whispers, “Help us!”

 

 The soft, regular foghorn of his voice.

 

 From somewhere else, you hear Director Denial calling, “Here . . . kitty, kitty, kitty . . .” Her words stretched long and then broken by sobs, she says, “Come . . . to Mama . . . my baby . . .”

 

 His hands webbed with gummy red, Chef Assassin flexes his fingers, not touching anything, just staring at the body, he says, “You told me . . .”

 

 And Miss America crouching forward, her leather boots creak. She slides two fingers into the lace collar and presses the side of the blue-white neck. She says, “Snarky’s dead.” She nods at the Earl of Slander and says, “You must’ve forced some air out of her lungs.” She nods at the meat spilled off the plate, now breaded with dust and lint on the foyer carpet, and Miss America says, “Pick that up . . .”

 

 The Earl of Slander rewinds his tape, and Comrade Snarky’s voice moans and moans the same moan. Our parrot. Comrade Snarky’s death taped over the Duke of Vandals’ taped over Mr. Whittier’s taped over Lady Baglady’s death.

 

 How Comrade Snarky died was probably a heart attack. Mrs. Clark says it’s from a shortage of thiamine, what we call vitamin B1. Or it could’ve been a shortage of potassium in her bloodstream, causing muscle weakness and, again, a heart attack. That was how Karen Carpenter died in 1983, after years of anorexia nervosa. Fainted dead on the floor like this. Mrs. Clark says it was no doubt a heart attack.

 

 Nobody really dies of starvation, Mrs. Clark says. They die of pneumonia brought on by malnutrition. They die of kidney failure brought on by low potassium. They die of shock caused by bones broken by osteoporosis. They die of seizures caused by lack of salt.

 

 However she died, Mrs. Clark says, that’s how most of us will. Unless we eat.

 

 At last, our devil commands us. We’re so proud of her.

 

 “Easy as skinning a chicken breast,” Chef Assassin says, and he drops another lump of meat on the dripping paper plate. He says, “Christ Almighty, I do love these knives . . .”

 

  

 

 Plan B

 

 A Poem About Chef Assassin

 

 “To become a household word,” says Chef Assassin, “all you need is a rifle.”

 

 This he learned early, watching the news. Reading the paper.

 

 

 Chef Assassin standing onstage, he wears those black-and-white-checkered pants

 

 that only professional cooks get to wear.

 

 Billowing big, but still stretched tight to cover his ass.

 

 His hands, his fingers, a patchwork of scabs and scars. Shiny old burns.

 

 His white shirtsleeves rolled up,

 

 and all the hair singed off the muscle of his forearms.

 

 His thick arms and legs that don’t bend

 

 so much as theyfoldat the knee and elbow.

 

 

 Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment flickers:

 

 where two close-up hands, the fingernails clean and the palms perfect

 

 as a pair of pink gloves,

 

 they skin a chicken breast.

 

 His face, a round screen, lost under a layer of fat, his mouth lost under the pastry brush

 

 of a little mustache,

 

 Chef Assassin says, “That’s my backup plan.”

 

 

 The Chef says, “If my garage band never gets a record contract—”

 

 if his book never finds a publisher—

 

 if his screenplay never gets a green light—

 

 if no network picks up his pilot episode—

 

 The Chef, his face worms and twitches with those perfect hands:

 

 skinning and boning,

 

 pounding and seasoning,

 

 breading and frying and garnishing,

 

 until that piece of dead flesh looks too pretty to eat.

 

 

 A gun. A scope. Good aim and a motorcade.

 

 What he learned as a kid, watching the news on television, every night.

 

 “So I’m not forgotten,” the Chef says.

 

 So his life isn’t wasted.

 

 He says, “That’s my Plan B.”

 

  

 

 Product Placement

 

 A Story by Chef Assassin

 

 To Mr. Kenneth MacArthur

Manager of Corporate Communications

Kutting-Blok Knife Products, Inc.

 

 

 Dear Mr. MacArthur,

 

 Just so you know, you make a great knife. An excellent knife.

 

 It’s tough enough doing professional kitchen work without tolerating a bad knife. You go to do a perfect potatoallumette,that’s thinner than a pencil. Your perfect cheveu cut, that’s about as big around as a wire—that’s half as thick as a potato chip. You make your living cutting carrotsbrunoisettewith hot sauté pans already waiting with butter, people yelling for those potatoes cutminunette,and you learn quick the difference between a bad knife and a Kutting-Blok.

 

 The stories I could tell you. Time and time again, how your knives have pulled my ass out of the fire. You chiffonade Belgian endive for eight hours, and you might get some idea what my life is like.

 

 Still, it never fails, you cantournébaby carrots all day, carving each one into a perfect orange football, and the one you screw up, that carrot lands on the plate of some failed cook, some nobody with a community-college degree in hospitality services, just a piece of paper, who now thinks he’s a restaurant critic. Some prick who hardly knows how to chew and swallow, and he’s writing in next week’s paper how the chef at Chez Restaurant is lousy attourné-ing carrots.

 

 Some bitch no caterer would even hire to flute mushrooms, she’s putting in print how mybâtonnetparsnips are too thick.

 

 These sellouts. No, it’s always easier to nitpick than actually to cook the meal.

 

 Every time somebody orders thedauphinoisepotatoes or the beef Carpaccio, please know that someone in our kitchen says a little prayer of thanks for Kutting-Blok knives. The perfect balance of them. The riveted handle.

 

 Sure, knock wood, we would all like to make more money for less work. But selling out, turning critic, setting yourself up as a know-it-all, and taking cheap shots at the people still trying to make their living peeling calf tongue . . . paring away kidney fat . . . pulling off liver membrane . . . while those critics sit in their nice clean offices and type their gripes with nice clean fingers—that’s just not right.

 

 Of course, this is just their opinion. But there it is, showcased next to real news—famines and serial killers and earthquakes—there it’s given the same-sized type. Somebody’s gripe that their pasta wasn’t quite al dente. As if their opinion is an Act of God.

 

 A negative guarantee. The opposite of an advertisement.

 

 To my mind, those who can, do. Those who can’t, gripe.

 

 Not journalism. Not objective. Not reporting, but judging.

 

 These critics, they couldn’t cook a great meal if their life depended on it.