h2>Dating : flash fiction: hot
zavanna forks through the last of the lettuce on her plate and stuffs it into her mouth, what a wonderful taste, especially the tomatoes, the cucumbers, the salt and pepper, and she tells her grandfather kassandros that nothing beats vegetables especially tomatoes directly from his garden — she runs toward his garden and bends over a plant with broad green leaves and about a dozen green things hanging from it, she asks what they are, and kassandros responds they’re jalapeños, and he asks if she wants a small taste —
zavanna says, yes of course
grandpa kass i will eat anything from your garden have i ever said no? and he says, no, but you have only eaten what i have chosen for he you, and i have chosen the best of what i think you would like, but i worry about the jalapeños they’re hot, especially for a 9-year-old, have you ever eaten one? zavanna shakes her head and says she’s never heard of one, she asks what he means by hot, and kassandros approaches the plant, bends over and digs his thumbnail into the stem and breaks the jalapeño off from the plant and tells her she’ll have to taste a little for herself to find out —
with his fingers he wipes off the jalapeño
for symbolic cleanliness and hands it to zavanna who rolls it over several times in her hand, inspecting it in silence, and then she throws the entire chili into her mouth, bites down hard, and spits out the stem — kassandros had intended to tell her to take a tiny bite, but she moved too fast, and he chokes in anticipation, by now the juice of the seeds should be spreading through her mouth — he prepares for a howl of pain, he’d have to explain this mistake to his daughter why he’d let a 9-year-old child do such a thing —
zavanna chews and pushes
the jalapeño pieces around her mouth, looking over her grandpa’s head, in thought, trying to understand it, saliva drips over her lips, and she smiles and nods, she says, so good, so good grandpa kass — he tells her to spit the rest onto the ground and he’ll fetch a glass of milk, that she’ll be okay not to worry, and she says, yes, a glass of milk sounds wonderful, and she apologizes because she already swallowed it all, she can’t spit it out now, and she asks, what do you mean by hot?
Image by Antonio Jose Cespedes from Pixabay
