Potato Soup Monologue

That very first time, in anger I threw the potato soup at my older sister then crawled like a spider underneath the table whining and crying. I was hungry. Mother said there would be no soup for me but filled my sister’s bowl a second time. They sat and ate and laughed. I crawled further into myself and listened to my sister’s slurps and smacks of her lips and her mouth-filled voice tanting me. “It’s good—so good.”
That night I dreamed of the spider who eats its mate, slurping and smacking, until nothing is left. In the morning, I was soaked red and my sister didn’t wake. We buried her two days later, clad in her Sunday dress with the squared buttons running down the middle and the blue shoes she hardly ever wore. My mother never made potato soup again and I never asked for it. But I still crave it, at dusk and at dawn, when hunger pangs strike at me most painfully and I dream of the spider who eats its mate.

“It’s a dream that soaks me red each time I eat the damn potato soup…”
I don’t get to finish what I wanted to say.

My face slams on the counter and meteorites skirt around the smoke filled room.
“Hope the bump got you sober.” She stares down at me with an eyebrow raised in surprise and a smirk of disbelief on her lips.
“It’s all true.” I say, reaching for the beer. How many I had so far? Enough, I hope, to stop the potato soup from haunting me tonight. “I haven’t eaten any since that day, you know, because of the spider that eats the soup and then its mate.”
“Oh yes, the spider that eats its mate, don’t they all?” she asks.”
“Not all, just those who spin their web on the potato soup,” I tell

her.
She says I’m insane. “Perhaps you should try my potato soup. I’m a great cook and my kitchen is clean, no spiders there.”
She scribbles a number on a napkin, buries it inside my shirt pocket, then walks away with her head turned so she can still look at me from the corner of her eye.
I think about her every night. I want her with or without the potato soup. It’s been a while. On Friday, we meet again in the same pub. I sit close to her and say, “perhaps you should prepare the soup for me, just the way my mother did: one onion, two cloves of garlic, black pepper, parsley, and lots of new potatoes. And then perhaps the spider won’t eat its mate. ”
She smiles, taps the empty wine glass with her lilac nails. “Tomorrow around seven-thirty. 18 Saddle Brook road. Don’t be late.”
I know she likes flowers, so I send her roses by special delivery and bring some Chilean red wine. Her studio flat is minimalist and cosy: ice white walls, a full moon Chinese lamp hanging down from a blue ceiling and in one corner, behind a see-through bookcase, a sofa bed is set for the night. The lilac sheets and double stacks of satin pillows do tempt me. I force my gaze away, fix it on her china doll stare.
She doesn’t blink, but holds mine steady.“You look good,” she says, relieving me of the bottle of wine.
I brush her cheeks with my lips. She smells of Coco Chanel behind the ears.
“Uhm,” I say, “I am hungry.”
“Right this way.”
She leads me into the alcove that dubs as a kitchen, a sliver of a rectangle with pots and pans pegged on hooks screwed into the white backsplash. At the very end, a tiny table is set for two. All around me candles burn, silverware sparkles, and the air is wild with the smell of potato soup.
I sit at the table and she sits on my right, drawing toward her the china bowl out of which plumes of smoke swirl. “The way your mother made it.”
She lists the ingredients one by one and stirs the mixture with tender strokes. I think she’s pretty and petite and I eat the soup offered to the last spoonful, slurping and smacking my lips with delight. She’s really a good cook. We make love, the satin sheets feel cool, her body much too warm, and then we sleep. When at dawn I awake, she’s lying next to me smiling with mischief.
“See, there is no spider that eats its mate.”
I smile too. This petite thing might be right I think, but then I hear the slurp the spider makes and smell the potato soup that killed my sister.
I’m hungry.