Way back last year, I wrote some  fiction installments called Organic Humans(billed as Chick Lit – or Fiction involving a chicken). Many of you said you liked them. Thanks for that, you’re great. I’ve assembled the 4 existing parts here in one place, in case you hadn’t read them and might like to catch up. I’d love some feedback as I’m considering turning them into a longer piece. Enjoy!

Part 1

Jacinta took the eggs from her furled apron and hurled them at the hen-house wall.

“Soufflé,” she muttered, “I’ll give him soufflé.”

This was a lie; she wouldn’t be giving him soufflé. The yolks slithering down the hen-house were testament to that. The fact that she had hurled something from a furled thing wasn’t lost on her, either. This was war.

She had met Kevin on organichumans.com, a dating website for singles with an environmental leaning, and she’d thought he was perfect. Handsome, but on the wane; solvent but not rich (rich was too exhausting); had been married (good enough for someone else) and divorced (too good for them); outdoorsy and an animal lover; perfect.

On the first date, he’d told her she was a goddess. He paid for dinner at the best raw place in town (there was nothing Kevin didn’t know about an enzyme). He drove her all the way home – four miles from anywhere – and when he came in for dandelion coffee he didn’t laugh at her loom; he said he had been wondering all night if they couldn’t possibly weave some dreams together? It was a cheesy line, but Jacinta liked cheese. She was thinking of getting into it, and had already bought a goat.

Kevin stayed that first night. Jacinta was much too old to make coy, but very excited about making breakfast. Besides, Kevin seemed genuinely impressed with her hen.

Part 2

If you’d hooked Kevin up to a lie-detector, you’d have quickly ascertained that he didn’t like looms and he wasn’t impressed by hens. He wasn’t really training to be a yoga-teacher for deaf-kids; he worked in Buckingham Palace – a Chinese restaurant that had been successfully sued by the Queen. Kevin was the guy who read the newspaper in the window until an order came in. He delivered the order on a scooter. This was especially insulting, because he loved his car. He was not allowed to use it for work. He would have been, if he’d agreed to have the Buckingham Palace logo (HRH QE2,, smiling and holding a pair of chopsticks…this had been the subject of the lawsuit) painted on the doors; he would never agree. He didn’t feel safe on the scooter, so he always got lost, and the Egg Foo Yung was always cold. Kevin didn’t like his job.

But there was nothing Kevin didn’t know about an enzyme. That much was true. Raw food was meant to be cold; he wished he was delivering it. Researching it became a passion, and it was on such a research mission, one night at home (he’d entered  Raw Passion – why cold is the new hot), that he’d stumbled upon organichumans.com.

He’d online dated before. It hadn’t worked out well. He always lied about his job, and they’d inevitably find out – usually when he chugged unwittingly to their homes with their order of Vegetables in Black Bean Sauce and Steamed Rice swinging from the handlebar – and once he’d been found to have lied about that, they found it safest to assume he was a serial killer.

But he’d always lied too big before. A round-the-world sailor needs to produce a yacht at some stage; surgeons don’t faint when they cut their own fingers making aubergine shavings. With Jacinta, he’d kept it small. He’d kept the work part vague, and focussed on the enzyme thing. She’d been very impressed, and when she told him early on that she was allergic to MSG, Kevin actually thought he might be falling in love. He wasn’t, but for the moment at least, the scooter was more bearable.

To be continued. Maybe.

PART 3

Jacinta hadn’t always been vegetarian. She hadn’t always been German either. With hindsight, picking an assumed name with a “J” at the start of it hadn’t been the wisest of moves for someone using an assumed accent that had no use for them. But in this kind of rural community, they were more likely to accept someone really, properly foreign than an ex secretary from Dublin, especially one with radical environmental ideas. Irish people weren’t very green. The irony wasn’t lost on her.

If she’d “come down from Dublin…with her loom” (the stress would have been so heavy on the last word, there’d have been creaking), she’d have been accused of “having notions”. This was a fate worse than drowning or burning at the stake; having notions about oneself was a drier, colder, slower social death. But arriving from Hamburg with a loom and dreams of a goat’s cheese cottage industry was welcomed. It was assumed that you would walk around naked a lot to make up for it.

Of course, Jacinta had never been to Hamburg. The name slipped off her tongue one day when she was asked to fill in some of her background-blanks. She didn’t know if it was North, South, East or West, but she did know she’d been craving minced beef patties that day. She rarely even thought about meat these days, but every now and again when she was stressed, a fat, juicy burger with all the trimmings called to her. Since she’d met Kevin, she hadn’t had one stressful day and the ketchup had remained firmly in the cupboard. There had simply been no need for buns. Until now.

Part 4

All this time, Jacinta had refused to use a mobile. Phone, that is. She had numerous mobiles hanging around the house, made from blown-out eggs, dyed, painted and threaded-through; they reminded her there was a hen outside and that made her very happy. She made pin-holes in both ends, and blew gently but firmly til both whites and yolks globbed gently into a bowl. Then she made omelettes, while dreaming of what design she should do. A lot of them had love-hearts on, but not all. She didn’t want to lose her edge.

Jacinta loved omelettes. They were honest and simple – the way she liked to see herself. But the MSG allergy was only the tip of the iceberg. Jacinta was high maintenance. And as for honesty, well, she’d left that behind in Dublin along with her Irish accent. In fact, even Kevin was now calling her “Yass”, according to her coaching. Sometimes she didn’t know if he was calling her by her abbreviated name, or making a meal of replying in the affirmative. “Yass,” he’d say. “Yes to vat?” she’d enquire, Germanly. “Yass, you. Yacinta. I was going to ask you if you had any ketchup. My omelette’s a little…well…dry.”

This was last Thursday. Jacinta had paused, her eggy fork halfway to her mouth. She was a mess of insecurities: she knew her limitations as a weaver, and she hadn’t yet found the right goat. None of the ones she’d “met” gave her the right vibes. Also, she’d known Kevin for 3 months now, and although he stayed most nights, there was a lot she didn’t know about him (except that he probably didn’t love her; goats weren’t the only ones who gave her vibes). In short, her love and business-lives were far from set – but you could never, never say the same about her omelettes. They were perfect. Never runny, but never dry. And replete with enough fines herbes to negate the addition even of salt. But ketchup? That had come out of nowhere. He’d never questioned the seasoning before. Was he deliberately trying to wound her? Or was he just getting bored?

She replaced the suspended fork to one side of her plate without a word. The bit of perfect omelette on it cooled as she rose and rifled through her store-cupboard. There was an old glass Heinz bottle in there; she knew there was, although it hadn’t been used since the last stress-burger emergency. She moved essence of this and tincture of organic that to get to it. Then she moved back to the table, hammering the blood-red sauce to the top of the bottle, upside down. It was what she had to do, but she didn’t have to do it for as long as she actually did it. Kevin winced – mainly because his omelette was getting cold. Yet again he found himself wishing for raw food, but Jacinta would insist that nothing be wasted, and that hen would insist on laying daily.

Before he knew what he was doing, the words came out of his mouth.

“Why don’t we cook something else next time? I mean, you can make lots of things with eggs. What about…I  mean…what about…soufflé?”

Just at that moment, Jacinta’s hand connected – hard – with the bottom of the upside down bottle, and a huge pool of ketchup glopped onto the centre of Kevin’s plate. Jacinta felt as if her heart had glopped out of her chest. She wondered what she could make with the remains: she really did hate to waste anything.

To be continued.

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