my gourmet slaughterhouse...
The taste for exotic seafare knows no bounds. Managed to buy a whole eel from QV during the closing hours and had to negotiate like crazy to get the kindly fishmonger auntie to cut that elongated creature for me. She bargained with me saying she'll charge me $2AUD less if i could do it myself! Knowing how notorious eels are (slipper slimy speedy smooth like orang minyak impossibly to grasp textures), i stuck to my request and she promptly slammed the slender blade on the 'dead' creature with forthy blood oozing from the ends, crimson-fresh like never seen before and nudged mr / ms whatever anguilla rostrata (from the anguillidae family of species) into a clean paper bag. She begged me never to ever make her chop an eel again. Gross supreme she said. Immaculately bound in plastic bag, i took it home. This includes a 45min visit to an asian grocer where i found precious wodges of kiam-chye for porridge. It was salvific.
Dinner over (1 hour), i poured the chopped contents on the sink and began the butchery.
The thing moved.
Not the head but a fleshy chunk of its body...i flipped the knive like a madman, horrified by its resilience, and deep in me, the first scenes of Alien Trilogy rocked my mind and shook the very foundations as to how creatures live and die. Yeah...ok ok i'll be honest...dramatics aside, i jumped...
............literally
from the sink, hair-stood on ends and simply horrified by the Texas-chainsaw massacre cut cum black-fleshed Sadako wriggling on the floor scene...appearing to be re-adapted and shown before my very eyes. Freezed over, i shouted at Adrian, my flatmate to have a look. Bored and sleepy as usual, he took out a camera instead and began to take savage delight in filming (forensic style) my first attempts to terminate the slithering afterlife of a quarter-chopped medium-sized freshwater eel who is (was) supposed to die.
The remaining chunk of flesh tightened, with no head and tail even as i tried to remove its innards from the flesh. It tingled and moved, almost in near-delight, tickled by the sharp contours of stainless blade coursing over its veins. I didn't know what else to do except to mentally spin several horror-macho tales to beef up my intention to end this sad thing of a remnant life, forever. It refused to die.
Every damned part of its body was literally swimming in neurotic currents except its flabbergasted head...open-jawed, shocked and probably laughing at the visual squirm i had on my face even as its serpentine body eluded those hopeless fingers of mine. Glorious slime and all, river-fresh, zero fishy smells yet resistant to the core!
I jumped a few more times as i cut through a near-moving mass of bottom-end flesh, pulling out every discernable piece of organ...a tightened heart, white intestines, pear-shaped stomach. I even tried to stake that lump of a heart, convinced my literary knowledge and mastery of Stoker's Dracula would prove handy this time. It didn't. Quite.
Then, from nowhere, there appeared in my mind a slow vision of my secondary school days where i excelled in Biology (and obtained constant distinctions...ahem) and i began to remember vaguely that the central nervous system in most invertebrates was centered in the spine. The neurons make their home in there, it must. Armed with all possible kitchen weaponery at my side, 2 large blades and my trusty scissors (with adrian still silent and filming the morbid scene like some psycho out of australia's last asylum), i worked deep into the flesh, and snipped with evil intent at the single line of bones that held the decontextualized life of an eel together. Still, the chunk of flesh tightened like a resistant serpentine alien from outer-space, suspense cringing at the tips of flesh, curling, meandering, mucked-filled movements which lay sprawled luxuriously on the sterile kitchen sink, rebelling and refusing still, to die.
The scissors snipped the spine. A deathly load of silence hung in the air. I breathed deeply. The half-chunked horror of a-once-upon-a-time-full-grown eel finally lay silent, taut and potent to the last seconds, (Post-gothic Freudians, please refrain from other irresistable interpretations)...then it flattened out, last crinkles of nerve all gutted out and finally,
IT DIED.
