Tomas and the Onions

August 6th, 2009

Tomas was eating an onion. It was his third straight day of eating nothing but onions, and he was beginning to feel the effects.

For one thing, his piss had started to smell like onions. For another thing, he was really sick of onions.

They were only the white ones too, not even a variety of yellow and red and maybe a fancy sweet Vidalia. Just plain white onions. At this point he’d settle happily for a leek, or a clove of garlic. He’d like some dandelion greens, or maybe some chicory. He’d eat any damn thing that grew in the damn yard.

He looked morosely at his fingers, clasped around the plain white onion, and then took another big bite from it. He swallowed the juicy mess down. He pondered his index finger again, gave it an experimental lick and then nibbled at it tentatively. It was no good. He lacked the tenacity to bite it right through. Godverdomme! He thought of hurling the onion away in disgust, but then reconsidered and set it gently down on his plate.

Tomas looked over at the dog. The dog was eating steak tartare. He seemed to be enjoying it, too. The tags on his collar rang merrily against the edge of his white porcelain bowl as he devoured its contents. What an annoying sound! Few things had ever been more irritating.

This really was some bullshit. Narrowing his eyes balefully, Tomas glared at the dog and thought it had some damned nerve. He was no fan of dogs in the best of circumstances, and these were not those. Overall, Tomas figured that dogs were good for only two things: incessantly licking their own balls, and all other types of shenanigans.

Tomas’s stomach made awful gurgling noises as he pondered the dog’s dinner, but his gorge rose as he tried to bring the stupid white onion with two bites out of it back to his mouth.

He was not sure if this whole thing was going to work.

Filed under: Grand Conspiracy | Comments (8)

8 Responses to “Tomas and the Onions”

Julie on August 6, 2009 12:32 pm
How Baudelaire of you! I am appalled at how badly I wanted the dude to eat his finger.
narcise on August 6, 2009 2:32 pm
hmmm…i am intrigued by tomas’s circumstance. intrigued is actually far too sophisticated a word. i’m downright curious and potentially in danger of losing sleep over this curiosity…
AVD on August 6, 2009 3:37 pm
I’m with you on an affinity for the absurd. I loved this.
evad on August 7, 2009 8:45 am
This is madness. (If only you could have just heard the clang of my keyboard as I typed that period. It sounded like a genuine typewriter.)
DSKS on August 7, 2009 12:12 pm
ftw. I enjoyed reading this.

Liked, “The tags on his collar rang merrily against the edge of his white porcelain bowl as he devoured its contents.”

I didn’t understand the intent of the contradiction in this line, though, it seems to jar a little:
“Overall, Tomas figured that dogs were good for only two things: incessantly licking their own balls, and all other types of shenanigans.”
superBadGirl on August 7, 2009 12:19 pm
Thanks, I am glad you enjoyed it!

That line that jars is actually supposed to not make sense. He specified that there were two things, but one of the things is rather infinite.

Just one more indication of a somewhat disordered thought process I suppose.
AVD on August 7, 2009 5:05 pm
That’s interesting, “Overall, Tomas figured that dogs were good for only two things: incessantly licking their own balls, and all other types of shenanigans” was the only thing that jarred me too. But I decided that it almost works into my thing about kōans and the like. It certainly contains “aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding” and might “be accessible to intuition.” Maybe.
Stevo Darkly on August 7, 2009 5:59 pm
I thought it was odd and baffling. But I was compelled to read the whole thing until the end, because it made me want to see how it turns out. Yes. I read the whole thing. Eagerly. And someday you’re going to pay for that.