I READ IN A BOOK BETTER THAN ME of the Schöne Müllerin theme of unattainable beauty and also that green turtles are the source of turtle soup. How ridiculous, I think. How preposterous, I think. I am not a green turtle, I am Rind. M, and I am the source of Rind. M Soup. I am the well from which Rind. M soup will be brought up by the bucket.
Everywhere I walk I see it, soup with hands and feet and arms splashing along the circumference of the wind, and I splash myself around and rent a test kitchen by the canal and purchase on credit the biggest hand built ceramic bowl I can find and have it carried in by twenty burly figures who place it on a purpose built hob I’ve destroyed the polished white tile floor of the test kitchen to have installed.
The hob has the sharp mocking angles of a gargoyle making a gurgle and the bowl atop it is fat and round and large and suggests with its round fat largeness that it’s the entrance to another realm. A wooden ladder with the texture of dry clay leans against the bowl and I climb up to the rim and pour, one pail after another, filtered water in – a wannabe Sisyphus with a choice.
It takes seven days and seven nights for me to fill the bowl up enough, and it takes even longer for the water to start to simmer. Soup isn’t energetic.
The heat coming from the bowl and gargantuan hob – the air all around it shimmering, dancing – is spreading and attracting attention, children from the nearby hamlet approach wishing to play, to take photos, to hit their mobiles on the sides of the bowl and laugh at the sounds generated and glass cracked. I want to avoid children getting hurt and adults shouting at me, so I bury a small sign with a spike in the bottom in a patch of threadbare grass between the test kitchen and canal that reads: Danger. Soup being made.
I had to remove the roof of the test kitchen, of course, mainly due to the size of the soup bowl but also to prevent condensation forming like the seedlings of water stalagmites from the steam rising from my soup, so now the test kitchen really isn’t so much in a building but merely protected by the walls of a once-upon-a-building. The lip of the bowl rises above the walls which once wore a hat, the naked tops of which flicker as fairy lights diagnosed with frenetic energy would from the wires I have snipped like defunct cupids’ bows.
The simmering water in the bowl resembles the ocean boiling as our sun turns against us, a primordial ooze letting its moisture cook away and leaving vacant holes in its moveable mass, and I start off small. I clip and drop my toe and fingernails into the bubbling. They are swallowed, winks in a hall of blinks, and the soup spits haphazardly. Exuberantly. I tape several bin bags to my ankles, wrists, and neck and run up and down the canal in clear sight of the children my sign has done nothing to prevent gathering, children who stand all wide eyed and open mouthed with giant spoons in hands that clench with a peekaboo kind of hunger. I run in front of them as an auditioning jester would and fill my bin bags with salty sweat from the depths of me and then I drain them with some difficulty into the soup where it collects like oil on water before sinking but leaving behind as tokens small flakes of white on the surface which persist and, I hope, catch the eyes of passing birds above.
Viscous is what Rind. M soup is gently becoming as I hurl in lumps of thick yellow and green earwax and snot, rolling the materials into sticky balls between my finger and thumb and flicking them into the soup to maximise flavour and personality. Colourful is what Rind. M soup smells like as I let my urine splay in an amber arc into its centre for I am the figure piece of a broken down fountain, scraping out and tossing lumps of my faeces after the arc too – for I am too a deprived living statue merely masquerading as a centre piece – where they bob and float, fibrous, until the heat proves too much for even the sturdy sword of fibre and they fall back into the embryonic materials they were formed from.
My warning sign seems to be shifting forward, or the world it is implanted in does, for the children seem larger than before, individual model villages distorting what makes a model a ‘model’, and they hit their giant spoons against the giant spoons standing shoulder to shoulder with them and the sound produced is that of a great armoured horse trudging on weary but cobbled stones towards an unsightly war.
I take a cheese grater thoughtfully provided by a cupboard in the test kitchen to the rough skin on my knees and elbows and let my essence drift like the gentlest of snow down into the soup. I scrape at the back of my throat for material where my voice seems to come from and when I gather enough of something, roll it into a white ball and add that too. I am naked for my clothes have been minced as small as possible and tossed too into the soup, and I sit on the lip of the bowl – the chimney of a well lived house, letting steam and smoke rise through me – and masturbate furiously, once, twice, thrice, on and on and let what is produced in progressively smaller quantities fall in leaps and bounds into my soup, where it breaks away in solidarity.
The distant floor outside the flickering walls of the test kitchen is made of a type of hyper-compressed mud somehow both dry and moist, and I splay my arms like wings of desire and leap off of the side of the bowl to fall upon it, landing on my chest so firmly I am winded and, after gagging for a while, cough up a thick clear jelly which I gather, the eyes of the waiting children swallowing my every movement, and throw into the soup too where it floats, a ghost that finally finishes the business and sinks out of sight.
I bleed for my soup, sticking each of my finger and thumb tips with a sharp and thin knife – also provided by the bountiful test kitchen – and feel my pulse as a tribal beat inciting frenzy and hedonism in the individual cells of my blood which dance provocatively out of me and drop towards the future. My head has been shaved, of course, and the skin there feels as soft and furry as a tennis ball ready to be what it is as I gather and dip the coarse mound of my locks beneath the surface of the soup where individual strands float, spaghetti refusing to expand.
My soup looks marvellous at this point and the sight of it whips me like a cream, filling me with air and transformation, the ochre light emitting from it getting stronger as even more of me goes into it.
The photographs of family members and close friends; the hand drawn maps; the personally sewn ponchos; the postcard collection; the top hat I’ve always wanted to buy; the hamster I wish I’d never brought; the 8.5-centimetre ball bearing I kept throughout my childhood in a red canvas backpack locked in a bright pink metal replica of an American school locker; the keys to my flat; the spare tyre to the car my grandad had; the tune I can sometimes never get out of my head; the dandelion I always want to pick; the dildo I let get lost in my hair; the second shadow I suspected was attempting to overthrow my primary shadow; the surname my great grandmother lost; the sunglasses I’ve never worn; the pint glasses I’ve stolen; the humdrum mornings blending cyclically into one; the Sunday nights I fear; the orange brick I wish to become; the tuna cans I forsake for environmental reasons; the cigarette butts I’ve gathered; the stones I have licked; the apples too soft and too hard and too perfect I’ve eaten; the pears; the unicycle learned; the bike never ridden; the small blue tea plate I once tossed beneath a skip; the forklift I sat in once; the stained glass window I lost an hour inside; the cobbles I sometimes trip on; the other cobbles I sometimes catch myself on; the rivers drunk; the rivers swam; the ponds I can remember; the carrots I’ve consumed, and the peppers and cucumbers and grapes too; the microwave I remember best; the rice cooker I brought as a present and never gifted; the maggot I saw once and then lost sight of.
My soup is cooking nicely; I can smell a diminished version of myself rising from the surface of its brilliant depths, and the smell floats around like smoke with visible cartoon glee while the waiting children, who have trodden on my warning sign, circle the bowl like a ring around a finger.
I am thoroughly worn out and feel I have nothing left to give. I take an extra-long ladle and dip it into the depths of my soup and taste myself and wait to feel a clicking into place, one of satisfaction and desire meeting in the middle, an ouroboros eating itself forever. But I have not attained beauty, and my soup tastes like a mixture of water, rust, and the roof of a mouth after a night of heavy drinking.
I throw the ladle away; I’m not afraid of attaining. I stretch my limbs out and dance on the lip of the bowl with the abandon of a banana that knows it will eventually be chopped up for nothing but porridge, but not yet, for I am the giraffe seeking to leap over the moon and I dance on the lip and then I dive from the lip and I enter my soup. Rind. M in Rind. M soup. Rind. M soup drawing all strength from Rind. M’s muscles and drawing too Their essence, which is a spindly and white thing seeping from Their pores.
The ochre light becomes coruscant as They are cooked and though the soup is bubbling loudly, flavouring itself like an automation in motion, all that can be heard are the dull clinking claps of spoon bellies on spoon bellies and a voice shouting: “We can share. We can all share!”