I’d wanted to acquire live foods I could reproduce for my diners whom I’d housed in a separate aquarium in the living-room. I’d wanted to acquire live foods so that my diners could watch them reproducing, thoroughly aware that they would ultimately consume the brutes comfortably within the confinements of their enclosure. The banana prawn proved costly; a buildup on ammonia by the way of nauplii wastage, decomposition of their casings that sent them into a dire dehydration, as did the vinegar eels, and the mealworms; hingebeak shrimp saw their salt concentration a little too high for their tank-size, resulting in a sudden outbreak of streptococcus. So, as a precaution, I’d fried each invertebrate on the stove with a knob of margarine, chewed through the many husks until their sapience curdled outwardly, dripping down my chin to my socks to the vinyl linoleum beneath.
isabelchiara