A Dinner Party [FICTOID]

Ding!

The butler sounded the chime announcing dinner.  The guests came in from the rooftop patio where they’d been watching evening fall on the city.

The host, homesick for Norway, lined his roof with potted spruce, and now they were infested with cicada.

The butler shut the doors to the insects’ relentless mating chirps and followed the guests into the dining room.

One of the guests, an orthodox priest wearing unorthodox aviator glasses and orange running shoes, gave the blessing.

Many of the other guests squirmed impatiently; not being believers, they eagerly wanted to dive in.

The chef and her scullery crew brought in the courses one by one, each more fabulous than its predecessor.

The guests began their dining extravaganza with hors d’oeuvres:  Deep fried toenail clippings from an endanger silverback gorilla (safely sedated and released back in the wild at the host’s insistence), followed by an ice cold soup of blended Bavarian beer and caviar, then roasted chestnuts stuffed with a puree of camel milk yogurt and black corinth currants as an appetizer, a spicy salad of jalapeño peppers and baby kale drenched in billy goat sweat, and then -- brought out on a canvas stretcher by the scullery crew -- the main course, a huge roasted fowl of enormous size, drenched with a honey glaze and sprinkled with pine nuts from the virgin forests of Saskatchewan, its long elegant tailfeathers dragging behind.

The salivating guests tore into the bird, ripping off its piping hot flesh and shoving it into their mouths.

They masticated with delight -- and then it hit them:  Horrific sharp abdominal pains that convulsed them in agony and bent them over double.

They vomited incessantly, covering themselves, each other, their host, and the table with the contents of their engorged stomachs.

The quivering hunks of meat slid across the table to coalesce and then, in a dazzling burst of light --

-- the phoenix arose once again.

© Buzz Dixon