The Devil's Larder

19

AFTER SHE HAD caught food poisoning from the soft cheese at the cafeteria (but before any of the symptoms had appeared), she had made love to her boyfriend and then to an old acquaintance she’d encountered entirely by chance, and then had kissed (though only playfully, but using tongues) her special friend in her local bar, a homosexual man, in fact.

She fell ill that evening, fever, headache, vomiting. And the three men caught up with her early next day. Fevers, headaches, vomiting, throughout the town.

Now, she wondered, could it be that in a world where there were evidently at least three cases of sexually transmitted indigestion, that there could be — that she could even cause — a single case of gastronomically transmitted venereal disease? Could that old devil, lurking in the bedroom, flourish in the kitchen too? Might she discover recipes to feed and satisfy and aggravate those famished lovers at her door?