Glassjaw Joe
No one told him an onion was capable of that sort of thing.
But here he was, sitting in his kitchen, nearest the door, and, well, looking at the mess, he had to admit that an onion very well was capable of just that sort of thing.
He was sitting nearest the door because he didn't have much choice, to be honest. For starters, it was a small kitchen. A stove that looked far too small for actually cooking anything on or in was crammed in between two anemic cupboard units topped with exquisite marble countertops (as one would expect, since the amount of marble actually used probably could have been removed from other larger counter installations without anyone noticing a piece missing). Pots and pans, failing to have any space allocated to themselves on the walls, hung from the ceiling, and a few even dripped water, like novelty-shaped stalactites. The walls, not occupied with pots and pans, were host to an exhaust fan that kind of encroached on the air space given over to the pots and pans a little bit, matching cupboards (and matchingly thin) above the counter, and a clock with rabbits on it. The fridge occupied one whole wall, and couldn't be opened all the way any longer, due to the edge of the exhaust fan, and the opposite wall to that was home to a tall kitchen trash can and, for some reason, one folded chair. A person of medium build and medium height (say five foot ten or so) was able to stand in approximately three feet of space in the kitchen without hitting their head on the exhaust fan, and if they were willing to stoop could stand in an additional three feet near the stove. In short, it wasn't a kitchen for sliding across in your sock feet.
And now that one onion (or at least he thought it was one onion, to be honest, he couldn't tell how many may or may not have been involved) had grown enough eyes of such great proportions that they'd engulfed the remaining open space in his kitchen, leaving him enough room to put two legs of a chair (not the folding one now hidden somewhere underneath all the onion tentacles sticking out of the cupboard he'd hoarded his onions in, one day long, long ago) on the tile, which he felt counted as sitting in the kitchen, should anyone give him grief for being unable to use his kitchen due to his negligence with this onions.
Which was a real shame, because he'd finally managed to clean out his bathroom the week before, and figured this might be considered yet another obstacle to ever bringing a girl home to see his apartment.
"Chicks don't dig overgrown onions," he thought as he dialed his friend that was always bragging about having a machete.
disclaimer:
Right, so, anyway. On to business.
Oh jeez. Oh man. I wrote that previous sentence before I checked Amazon.com for your weekly update on Fenway Fiction's sales ranking. And people. People, people, people. People! Was it a long week or something? Did all of our pleading go for naught by the time we got round to Monday again? Or like Grover in that book about the monster at the end of the book (worth reading, no matter your age, by the way), do you enjoy torturing us each Monday, purposefully not ordering your daily fix of Fenway Fiction on Mondays to drive the sales ranking low to give us fits for each disclaimer?
This fine Monday Fenway Fiction checks in at number three hundred fifteen, four hundred fifty seven. That's approximately seven billion from being number one. Without checking, I'm hoping this makes us closer to number one than anything Ethan Hawke's ever written. And to stave off the absolutely crushing disappointment I'd be engulfed by should any of the stuff he's..., well, written, I suppose, is the word you have to use for it, ranks higher than Fenway Fiction on Amazon.com, I'm not going to check at this time. Maybe some other day.
Did you realize this book is the first place you can see the real name for my first born child? Sure, there was Stan Grossfeld's article in the Boston Globe on July 1st, but it was written down well before that interview for the author's bio at the back of the book! So in addition to all the good stories, you'd be seeing an honest to goodness piece of history, and not boring history like Napoleon was very short and had a complex about it sometime thousands of years ago and he rode a horse but something palpable, Red Sox-related, and historical! I'm sorry, if that doesn't sell you, well, I don't honestly know what will.
Wait! What about a chance to meet the authors! Okay, not all of them (I don't think), but two of them, at the very least. How about that? Would that get you? And you could wait and buy all your copies of Fenway Fiction until then. And in doing so you'd be supporting a really nice group of authors, and a fine independent bookstore.
So here's the score again, because time is getting tight here, people.
The Reading: 5 to 7pm on Wednesday, the 28th of December, 2005, at the Booklovers' Gourmet bookstore in Webster, Massachusetts.
Be there, or truly be square.
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