Friday, November 20, 2015

braise, glutton, fourteenth


Once he had gotten through his fourteenth plate of succulent short ribs, Hal had officially been declared a glutton by the staff.  They didn’t even have time to braise another order of the ribs before he was calling for more.  He had already worked his way through a mountain of corn, once dripping with butter but redoced to nothing but cobb now.  The mashed potatoes, rife with garlic and rib dripping, had been polished off as well, along with the many artichokes bathed in the oily sauce that gave them just the right amount of salty flavor.

All of a sudden, as he was making his next order, Hal’s eyes bulged out and, after a moment of turning a vivid green, keeled over onto the floor, still as a scarecrow.  Everyone was in an uproar as the local doctor came over to him and looked him over, doing every test he could without a lab.  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but it looks like the poor man has died.”

“Of a heart attack?” a scared customer asked.

“No,” the doctor replied.  “Of hunger.”

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