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Garnish
     
     
    San Francisco, a fancy pants restaurant; and there’s a finger in my soup. Not the kind attached to a waiter with his thumb sloshing in the broth, either. A real finger, chopped off, with a cross tattoo between the first and second joints, and black knuckle hairs.
    If it weren’t for the black hairs, I might have eaten the soup in my semi-starved state and then alerted management, but I couldn’t get past the hairy knuckles. So I sounded the alarm and stayed around for the action.
    The restaurant owner, an imposing man with muscles bulging under his bib-apron, appeared beside my table, his granite face whitening. A cooler-headed waitress plucked the finger from my soup and announced, “It’s a joke. It’s not real. He said he wasn’t really going to do it.”
    She waved the finger, splattering drops of soup which proved not the best move in a crowded restaurant, and several diners dialed 911 during the stampede for the exit.
    Turned out, it was a prank. My waiter attended one of those San Francisco art schools with an emphasis on self-expression. The soup stunt was part of his graduate thesis. He’d carefully crafted the finger from real chicken bones, filed down, wrapped in raw meat and covered with realistic latex “skin.” Even the police admitted it was impressive.
    After a dither over pressing charges (I didn’t), a stern warning from police to the young self-expresser, followed by his instant dismissal by the owner, I was still hungry as a she-bear. Even though the restaurant was long past closed, the grateful owner insisted on serving me a multi-course, 5-star meal, which I accepted.
    L’Organique Carotte is renowned world-wide for its cuisine. The owner, in a delightful French accent, regaled me with descriptives of free-range, grain-fed meats, spring-watered hydroponic vegetables, and hand-harvested wild spices. With each sumptuous dish served, he recited the ingredients like a psalm. By the third course, he pulled up a chair.
    “’ Ow did you hear about my restaurant?”
    “ How could I not? The food world raved when Organic Chicken Tortilla Soup was served at your opening. ‘An unparalleled complexity of flavor’ I believe they said. Is it true Brad flew a serving to Kenya during Angelina’s pregnancy?”
    (I was gushing shamelessly, but if you only knew how difficult, how nearly impossible life is for a food purist like myself...I’d lost friends over it! And here was I, little Calley Westerberg, bookkeeper for the Wholistic Groceteria franchise, Seal Beach store, on my first solo trip to San Francisco, with the owner of L’Organique Carotte all to myself!)
    He looked down bashfully. His name was Henri, and he had a wonderfully husky voice. “Oh, I could not comment on Brad and Angie,” he demurred, “But do have a piece of pie filled with hand-gathered boysenberries from the top of MachuPichu, with a side of triple-pasturized ice-cream from a pre-dawn milking of Alpine cows.”
    While I scarfed, he asked about me. I shared every detail; my excruciatingly careful diet and supplement intake, my exact percentage of healthy body fat. He playfully squeezed my arm, and I fantasized what the muscles filling out his bib-apron would feel like under my fingertips. I must have talked for hours, and he hung on every word, asking all the right questions. A man who cared! I was falling in love...
    Finally, a pause for the ladies room was necessary. As I rose from the table, his smiling eyes were kind.
    The Ladies’ was all the way in the back, across from a heavy, unmarked door. It swung open, leaking cold air, and out stepped the art-student waiter. I was dumbstruck. “What are you doing here!“
    He tried to slam the door but I’d already glimpsed the unseeable: flayed, swinging carcasses of meat on hooks. Not beef, pork, or any kind of animal....they were hu—
    A strong hand closed on the soft flesh of my upper arm. Henri’s sandpaper voice caressed my ear, “I see you ‘ave