Chapter Text
The destruction of his sushi still kept him awake, sometimes.
Five months had passed. After the events of that meal, Jiro Ono left his home country of Japan, and began to travel the world in search of some fundamental truth about cooking. He thought he was a master, a god of his craft, but his world was rocked to its core that day. How could a man love something so abhorrent, so fundamentally wrong ? Jiro knew he wouldn’t learn in Japan, so he had to seek answers elsewhere. That, and he was wanted for the murder of an internationally renowned chef.
In any case, Jiro, exhausted and still without answers, rode into a small town in Alabama on an artisanal sculpted bicycle.
“I have travelled halfway around the world,” said Jiro in a strange accent he picked up from hanging around Liechtensteinian pirates and eating their seafood and gruel for two months. “I still am no closer to understanding the true nature of taste and flavor. This is taking so long.”
The sun set behind him, and streetlights began to buzz on down the street. Jiro began to look about for a hotel to stay the night, when suddenly he noticed a flickering from a dark alley in the corner of his eye. A light flashed on and off overhead, briefly casting a pallid yellow light on an old woman, with short white hair, glasses, and a pink, flower-patterned shirt. She stood silently with a smile stretched across her face, staring at Jiro.
“HELLO JIRO. I AM AUNT MYRNA.” the figure proclaimed from behind her smiling teeth.
“I... did not introduce myself to you. How do you know who I am?” Jiro asked, concerned.
Aunt Myrna continued, ignoring the question. “I HAVE THE TRUTH YOU SEEK. TASTE AND FLAVOR. UNDERSTANDING. COME WITH ME, AND I WILL PREPARE FOR YOU…”
She paused, and breathed in a deep, raspy breath.
“...PARTY CHEESE SALAD.”
The words reverberated across the empty street like a powerful invocation. To Jiro, their meaning was practically indecipherable, and yet... alluring all the same.
“Alright, ‘Aunt Myrna.’ I will try your recipe. If only because I am otherwise out of ideas,” lamented Jiro.
“GOOD. FOLLOW ME.” The being known as Aunt Myrna turned and lured the old sushi master towards her home, and a truth he could never accept.
Jiro and Myrna walked across town, to a small decaying house in the middle of an overgrown block. It seemed like the area around the lot containing Aunt Myrna’s home had been abandoned for years, with grass and weeds growing wildly in lots sectioned off from the sidewalk with rusty chain link fence. Curiously, there were no “for rent” signs, warnings to trespassers, cut sections of fence or even graffiti, almost as if the entire city had vacated this small area around the elder Myrna’s abode. Perhaps that is just my paranoia talking , thought Jiro incorrectly.
When Aunt Myrna reached the front porch of the house, she encouraged Jiro to lay his bicycle down and sit in a rocking chair while she prepared the dish. Jiro did so, sinking into the cushions and feeling more at ease now that the woman had left his sight. A headache he had barely noticed began to subside.
“Tuuuuurrrrnnnnn bbbbaaaaaccccckkkkkkk ” whispered a voice on the wind. Jiro paid it no mind. Probably someone giving directions a block over.
Eventually, Aunt Myrna returned from the shadows of her doorway, and offered a plastic fork and a plate of her concoction to the curious sushi chef.
“CONSUME.”
“Ah, yes.” Jiro looked down at what appeared to be some sort of… pudding dish? Egg? It was a yellowish jiggling mass with some green and red ambiguously vegetable chunks floating around in it as well. It seemed to be topped with… the type of cheese commonly found in a taco. Wasn’t this supposed to be a salad?
Jiro scooped some of the meal onto his plastic fork.
“Itadakimasu?”
He put it in his mouth.
Party cheese salad was a party in the same way that Julius Caesar’s assassination was a party. As Jiro chewed, the slimy effluvia of the main pudding base mingled sweetness with the crunch of the fetid bell peppers, the juice of canned pineapples, and salty store-bought cheese to create a foul sensation on his tongue. Jiro was transfixed in horror, captured in the moment as if under a hypnotic spell. Waves of confusion and disgust battered the crumbling cliffs of his fragile mind, eroding his sanity rapidly. He could feel his mortal shell recoiling, his sense of self fading to ash and dust, and his hope for humanity falling to ruin. He twisted in agony, brain trapped in an endless moment of soft and solid texture, of sweet and salty and clashing flavors and things which should never have been combined—an unholy matrimony of the highest order, the edible Antichrist.
He screamed mentally at himself to spit, open his mouth, DO ANYTHING TO STOP THIS, but his body refused. The bile that was surging up his throat receded as he finally swallowed the morsel.
Party cheese salad is not a concoction made by mortal men, with taste buds or a soul. Jiro knew, instinctively, what this bite had cost him, and wept. His answer was not worth this.
Mere seconds had passed, and yet to Jiro it felt like an eternity. Tears streamed from his eyes as he looked to the sky and uttered a primal roar of pain.
“MMMMM. SO GOOD. I KNOW IT.” crooned Aunt Myrna onerously as she gorged herself on the rest of the horrid meal. Chunks flew in every direction.
“You… why did you curse me with this?” asked Jiro between heaving sobs.
“YOU DIDN’T LIKE?” vocalized the abomination.
Jiro shuddered.
“OH. OH WELL. TASTE IS SUBJECTIVE I SUPPOSE.”
Wait… was that it? Was that the answer that Jiro was searching for? Perhaps there was no universal answer to explain how people could enjoy foods as vile as Fieri’s sushi mess, or Aunt Myrna’s jello mixture. Perhaps every person has different tastes, and different people should be allowed to enjoy different things. On the other hand… Jiro had eaten that party cheese salad.
Jiro looked to the old crone, trying to gauge if she had any scrap of humanity left in her.
“I ALSO MAKE COLE SLAW.”
Jiro pulled out a revolver and shot her in the head.