Bridget's Flame, November contest, week two, "Dine"
Preparing dinner had always been Jeffrey’s favorite task of the day. He fantasized about it all day at work, and fidgeted impatiently in his seat on the bus, going over each step of the preparation in his mind on the way home
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Then, I've never actually seen The Silence of the Lambs, but you weren't counting on me to have had seen it; you just wanted me to pick up on fava beans, chianti, and rare meats, and draw the obvious conclusion: that Jeff is totally eating someone's brains.
I think conceits like this are delightful, and I pretty much always want them pushed farther. The point of this piece is that it's essentially a joke, right - like all jokes, the payoff is the sudden reversal of expectation at the end, blah blah, you get me. I think that jokes are funnier when the difference between expectation and result is greater, and thus I would counsel you to milk this gag for all it's worth.
This is, of course, my preference. Your mileage may vary.
I've never seen Hostel. Nor have I ever seen any of the Saw movies. Indeed, I have no desire to see them whatsoever but I think we can draw a valuable lesson from the theme of, er, if we may call it this, the torture-porn genre, or, if you like, the classic trappings of suspense. Seriously. Jeff takes out the cleaver. He should do everything short of licking it. You're trying to make him into a little Hannibal Lecter, right? So he loves the cleaver. It is a beautiful cleaver. He may even draw the tip of his thumbnail along the edge to see if it's sharp enough. Then the strokes with the honing steel - loving, rhythmic, like petting an animal.
Just go nuts, I say. Have him lick his lips a bit more often.
Of course, if he _were_ eating brains he wouldn't dispose of the pulp and seeds like you would with a pumpkin. Hm. If you rewrote it, he should probably roast the seeds (t'make it look like he's eatin' roasty brainbits). It's actually not so hard to separate them out - I filled my sink with water and dunked all the goop in a colander and just sort of rubbed it all between my hands. But that is neither here nor there. So, okay - if you want to include a tell that Jeff Isn't Eating Brains, have him dispose of the seeds. If you want to keep the reader in suspense, make sure he lavishes attention on them.
This may seem counter-intuitive, but if you wanted to make it more "this-is-a-human-head", I would describe the pumpkin less, because you do such a good job of describing it I quickly begin to doubt that it's a head. And that makes me disappointed too early. God, I'm bloodthirsty.
I would also just refer to the pumpkin as 'the viand' consistently throughout the entire piece, because it just, y'know, sounds like Meat.
Hm! And grammatically, let's see...
You'll notice that I tend to avoid adjectives and adverbs; this is just a thing that I do because I'm really wonky about them. It's really just the last two paragraphs where the modifiers caught my eye; I'd strike "rich-looking", "delectable", and "orgasmically". and I'd change 'smell' to 'scent', if you strike 'delectable'. I just find that occasionally modifiers are used to mask weak nouns and verbs, and I, in my yearning for a more compact, anglo-saxon language, always strive for punchy predicates.
I'd advise changing the very last sentence from Jeff speaking aloud, to this:
"Mmmm. Stuffed, roasted pumpkin. Jeff groaned with pleasure. Becoming a Vegan seemed the greatest idea he'd ever had."
I just don't think he'd say it aloud.
But! all this is to say that this is a funny, mildly spooky piece, that has left me eying the pumpkin that we didn't carve - the one that's waiting to be made into pie - with a renewed sense of hunger and urgency.
Okay, Jacques, you need to stop giving us food prompts.
-D
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I have to say, it was hard to find a bunch of terms to describe a round-ish object; that was most of the fun. I'm going to go back and look at this later; right now I have to go do some errands.
I agree, the food prompts are causing me to over-eat!
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