Food for Thought

Jenny casually stirred the beef stew, staring blankly into the chunky mixture of meat, carrots and potato. She drew the metal spoon round and round and in figures of eight, the silky brown gravy seeping through the slots in the spoon leaving a trough behind which was quickly refilled.

In the lounge, Dan flicked though the texts on his phone, selecting which ones to delete and which to move into his precious ‘saved’ folder. It had become a bit of a game, saving texts received from his conquests until the contents of the folder numbered one hundred at which time he deleted them. He had done this three times now. The folder was currently up to sixty three and he was confident that it would be ready for the fourth deletion in a day or so. Sharon was a prolific texter.

Dan was annoyed with himself today though. Normally so careful, he had stupidly left his mobile phone on the coffee table in the lounge this morning as he was running late for work. He hadn’t realised until he’d reached the office and by then it was too late to go back and get it. He had momentarily considered phoning Jenny and asking her to run the phone in for him but he decided it would be unwise to draw her attention to it and the multiple unread texts that were likely to be waiting in the inbox for him. So instead, he had spent the day agitated and irritable, not just because Jenny might find them but because he couldn’t reply to Sharon’s messages and he needed to keep her keen. Of course, Dan didn’t want Jenny to find any incriminating evidence. That would be the end of their marriage and Jenny provided a comfortable home for him, cooked tasty meals, did his laundry and provided him with sex when pickings were thin but he was fairly confident she wouldn’t know how to access the inbox on his phone. She was technically illiterate; didn't want anything to do with computers and didn’t even own a mobile phone. Dan was a computer software executive – Jenny grew vegetables in her allotment and spent a great deal of her day eradicating slugs before they obliterated her sprouts and winter cabbages. As a married couple, they couldn't be more different. Once upon a time, Dan thought Jenny was Bohemian and unspoiled. Now he just found her boring and plain. All the same, he didn’t want to risk detection and so swore not to be that careless again. He scanned over the final unread text, ‘Hi snuggle bum. Not heard from you all day! Hope everything is ok. Pls txt soon! Last night was great as always. Hoping for more of the same tonight. Love you lots. Your S xxx’

Sharon was a catch. The tall, leggy blonde flicked every one of Dan’s switches so he wanted to keep their trysts going for as long as possible. He smiled as he moved her message to his special folder. Number sixty four.

‘Jen?’ he called out as he looked in the mirror above the fireplace and swept his fingers through his mop of dark hair, ‘is dinner nearly ready? I’m meeting a client at bar in town at eight. We've been chasing this account for months so I can't be late.’

‘Yes,’ came Jenny’s voice from the kitchen, ‘I’m just finishing it off. What time will you be getting home tonight?’

‘It’s going to be a late one,’ Dan shouted, ‘I’ll be dead on my feet after so I might just grab a hotel room and go to work from there tomorrow.’ He smiled at his flawless reflection. It was all so easy.

In the kitchen, Jenny stirred the final ingredient into the stew. She drew the spoon slowly and rhythmically around the pot as the pile of blue pellets gradually sank below the surface, dissolving into the rich, brown gravy.

‘You really should have deleted the contents of your saved folder snuggle bum,’ she whispered and smiled to herself at the prospect of eliminating yet another slug.