TUESDAY
Two strange days in a row; I had a conversation today, a conversation about the hierarchy and social status of cutlery, a conversation with my wooden spoon.
“The thing is”, he said to me, hanging up next to the draining board where I’d left him, “The thing is, buddy, even though I’m made of wood, I do have a heart.”
To begin with I spoke to him as if it was the most normal thing in the world, as if people all across the kingdom regularly took part in conversations with their cutlery.
“You what?” I said.
“You heard me, you four-eyed bugger!”
I may have fainted at this early point in our dialogue. When I got my senses back and glanced up to the little blighter he was still hanging there, upside-down, like a bloody Olympic-standard vampire bat, squinting at me with little eyes that I hadn’t noticed before. I may have passed out again at this point.
-
“Wake up, you bugger! Get me down! You! You, with the limbs...C’mon mate, take your time...”
I opened my eyes and immediately wished I hadn’t.
“Get me bloody down, I tell you... This is a crime, this is, an injustice. This is bloomin` Spoon-napping, this is. I’ll bloody have your eyes out...”
I glanced at my house-guest. He was grinning at me. It was a grin that a clown gives you after your child has popped him one in the nose, the sort of grin that an aged and genetically-enhanced goat might flash you after chewing through your front door, the sort of grin that you imagine God might have displayed just before he pulled the ethereal cracker labelled ‘Big Bang’.
“You’re a spoon.” I said.
“So are you.” said the spoon.
“No I’m not.” I said, slowly getting to my feet to look properly at this thing, face to face, eye to eye, man to spoon.
“Just checking.” he said.
“You’re talking?” said I.
“I am yes, you’re right.” said the spoon, “Whizz-bang! Wowsers! How did that happen, then?”
I looked at him for a while, quite puzzled, started to say something, stopped, then looked puzzled again.
“Look,” said the spoon, “get me down from here and I’ll tell you a story. You’ll like it. Probably.”
I clicked over my plans for the rest of the day. I had intended to sort out my cornflake collection today, and perhaps even alphabetize my belly-button fluff, if I had the time.
“What the hell.” I said, and helped him down.
TUESDAY AFTERNOON
“Well, in the beginning, you see, I was a tree.” said the spoon. “I don’t know what kind of tree, I’m not really fussed about kinds of trees. It lost its leaves in the winter, it had bloody squirrels running about all the time in it, it was a tree, you know. But, this is the funny thing; I was aware. Then one day the tree got blown down and suddenly I couldn’t feel anymore, I had no emotions, no thoughts, I just wasn’t alive. Next thing I know I’m hanging up in some cluttered crappy noisy shop and this big fat crazy woman grabs me and starts beating me off the table like I’m a bloody drumstick. Drumstick, I tell you, bloody hell, it’s not on, is it?
“Anyway,” continued my lunatic spoon, “ she puts me under her desk one day and forgets about me, and so I’m lying there all cold and damp, with some bloody stupid price-sticker on my handle, and I can’t see, or speak, or hear, or anything.”
He looked at me sadly, and I looked back, wondering how it was that a spoon could look sad.
“And so the thing is, I never heard any of the gossip, never got talking with the other lads, you know. I was forgotten about. Nobody cared. And, I’m sure you know that spoons are the loneliest pieces of cutlery anyway.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not completely with you.” I said, wondering if I’d lost my memory of a very recent and highly successful drinking session.
“Well,“ said the spoon, in his odd East-end London accent, “the knives pair up with the forks, see. You didn’t know that? You mean to say you’ve never seen them canoodling in the remains of your Sunday Dinner? Pah! You haven’t lived mate. But see, its the spoons, see, the spoons are lonely, really sad and lonely, you know. Imagine an old deaf half-blind incontinent penguin with bad-breath and a speech impediment. Now he’s not gonna have many friends around him, now is he? He’s lonely, that poor penguin. Now multiply that by the loneliness felt by a Queens Park Rangers supporter and you’ll get somewhere near to how we spoons feel.”
He made a big sighing noise, and his voice began to break a little; “And then, adding insult to bleeding injury, imagine you’re taken from your fellow kind, who didn’t say much to you in the first place, and hidden away in a dark box in a shop under a cash-desk. It’s like one of you human lot being sellotaped in a phone box and put in the Titanics’ glove-department. It’s just bloody...bloody...it’s not nice, that’s what it is...”
The spoon continued his angry sad demented monologue. I was sort of taking in his words but I was having to file them away in a mental drawer and attack each sentence carefully with a new army of sanity’s soldiers. I’d only just reached the part about the very sad disgruntled penguin and consequently hadn’t heard that I was now supposed to be expressing pity and empathy for this poor deranged spoon.
Suddenly, he somehow jumped from where he was sitting on the worktop and bonked me over the head with his handle.
“Ow!” I said.
“Serves you bloody right, you unsympathetic bugger! I’m lonely, right. And finally I decide to break the sacred silence of the spoons [He later told me that this was the pact that all cutlery had to take; they can talk to other cutlery, of course, but under no circumstances are they allowed to talk to other species; no blenders, crockery, microwaves, napkins, dishcloths and certainly not human beings] and who do I find to listen to me? You! You, yer bugger, with less intelligence than a bison on roller-skates. And you wouldn’t know what sympathy was if it jumped up on to your huge great spotty nose, danced the fandango, and spontaneously combusted on your eyebrows. I don’t know, of all the kitchens in all the world, I had to walk into yours...
“I envy all the other spoons, “ he sadly continued, “the knives, the forks, those stupid little scoopy things that you’re somehow supposed to eat ice-cream with; I envy them all, I wish I could be one of them, a happy spoon, but no...I’ve become so neglected, so unwanted, I’m not part of spoon society anymore.”
He jumped up and balanced on the worktop, looking me straight in the eye.
“Human,” he said, with a little tear streaming down his handle, “I’ve had enough. I want you to kill me. You’ve been killing and destroying things for thousands of years, so a lonely little spoon shouldn’t be too hard. I’m tired of my greasy spoon life, I don’t want to be an unwanted, unneeded spoon. I want to die.”
WEDNESDAY
I took the spoon out into the woods and shot him.
He went bravely, and shed a little tear when we got out of the car. He said that under different circumstances perhaps we could have been friends, perhaps even we could have attempted an inter-species relationship and charted new experimental boundaries in the human-spoon list of sexual positions.
That’s really why I shot him. I was going to pretend to miss and let him run away screaming into the trees. But that sexual stuff just scared me, so I let the sucker have it with both barrels, right in his scoop. It was the kindest thing for him really.
I can only hope that if there’s a kitchen in Heaven, if God needs the occasional spoon to stir his pot noodles and make his soup, then my friend Spoony will be up there now, smiling down on me and thanking me for ending his miserable life.
When I got home after the murder, I washed my clothes, threw away my gun, gathered up all my cooking utensils and dropped them in a big charity bag that was sitting on my doorstep.
I will learn to enjoy takeaways.
---end—
AFTERWORD:- I hope you enjoyed this stupid story; I can’t always write deadly serious Lovecraftian stuff, yo
u know. This was written in around 2002-ish, and is another result of me and Jonathan Strickland and a few others trying a weekly writing challenge. We randomly selected [from suggestions we all made] certain topics to mould into a story for next week; I think the topics were something like A Wooden Spoon, Envy, Humour and something else which I forget [perhaps Diary/Journal format, which would explain why this story is pointlessly written as a diary]. I seem to remember that this was one of those times I just threw something together on the afternoon before the evening it was due. It has been previously published nowhere, because would you publish the thing if I sent it to your magazine, it’s bleedin’ mental...
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