It started because I left the room.
That’s always when things shift. Not during the actual mess, but in the lull before it—when you think, just for a second, you can do something alone. I went to take the bin out. JC was meant to. But JC was “on a call,” which is his version of being in another country.
I was gone three minutes. Four, max.
When I came back, Albert had climbed onto the chair and was hunched over the hob like a chemist.
He’d emptied dry fusilli into the cast iron pan. Just pasta. No water, no oil. A wooden spoon was wedged in at an odd angle. Half the salt from the grinder had been scattered across the surface. There was olive oil on the floor. The bottle was under the table. A slipper was stuck to it.
“I’m making dinner,” he said, dead serious.
I didn’t ask questions. Just nodded like I was visiting someone else’s reality and didn’t want to get kicked out.
He told me I couldn’t help. I could only say “Yes, Chef.” If I forgot, he blew a whistle. I don’t know where he found the whistle.
He started adding things. Tinned tomatoes. Dried herbs. A peeled carrot that had seen better days. A raw egg, uncracked, just plopped into the mix. Slices of cheddar. A blob of ketchup. He added one anchovy very carefully, like placing a flag on the moon. Called it “the special fish.”
At some point he stopped to draw a label for the jar we didn’t have.
He called the dish Dragon Sauce #4. There were no previous versions.
I asked if he wanted to boil the pasta separately.
“No,” he said. “It cooks in the mix. That’s the trick.”
So I added water behind his back. Just enough to stop everything welding itself to the bottom. He was busy labelling things with masking tape, completely unaware.
JC wandered in, sniffed the air, said “experimental” and wandered out. I don’t even think he noticed the spoon was plastic and partially melting.
Eventually, Albert declared it ready. We sat at the table with two bowls and a measuring jug. The table was sticky. The jug had a spoon in it from yesterday.
He watched me take the first bite.
It was… hot. Salty. A bit sweet. The texture was confused. Some bits soft, others like biting into pencil erasers. But it was food. Sort of. It was edible in the way a half-remembered school lunch is edible. Nothing pleasant, but you don’t stop eating.
JC made himself toast.
Albert ate everything in his bowl. He wiped his face with his sleeve. Told me he might open a restaurant. Said he was “the cooker man now.” I said that sounded about right.
He cleaned up. Poorly. With a sock. But he meant it. He even tried to wash the spoon in the bathroom sink, because “the kitchen one’s too full.”
Later that evening, when he was half-asleep under a pile of cushions, he suddenly said, “Don’t let anyone copy it, okay? Or I’ll call the Los Justicieros.” I asked who that was. He pointed at his toy police car and whispered, “They know.”
So here we are. For the record, recipe rights belong to
Los Justicieros. Enforcement pending.