Red Cabbage

“What’s that by the body? Is that lettuce?”

 

Kane cursed under his breath, “That’s not lettuce. Those are cabbage leaves.”

 

“Cabbage leaves? I don’t understand..”

 

“You don’t have to. Get on the phone. Get armed response down here.”

 

“What?”

 

Kane looked at the fridge, “Now.”

 

If there was one thing Kane knew it was vegetables. Wait...was cabbage a vegetable?

 

He wasn’t sure anymore. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the body, the damn ache in his shoulder and those green leaves.

 

Those damn green leaves.

 

It took 10 minutes for armed response to arrive. They could have been dead ten times by then. Boys dressed as men with their matt-black toys. Kane hated them but they had their place, like most things.

 

They threw open the fridge. There was nothing there. Of course there wasn't.

 

Kane sent the boys away and cursed his luck, like always.

 

He thought about whether anyone would believe him, about how Cara was waiting for him at home, about how he always disappointed her and about how he'd had too much chocolate and not enough coffee.

 

He spat the words out like poisonous jam, "I'm going home. We'll pick this up in the morning."

 

Horton was shocked, "But it's 11 am?"

 

He was young, he'd learn. Or maybe he wouldn't. In the meantime Cara was waiting and she mattered more than another damn dangerous cabbage.

 

He slammed the door shut like a man slapping cheese on a sandwich. It bounced insolently. He caught it and closed it, cursing his damn luck again.

 

Cara was there, like always, sitting in her chair. She eyed him warily as he poured himself a drink. Judgement came easy to her.

 

He rubbed his shoulder with his free hand, "I can't do a damn thing Cara. Not a damn thing."

 

Cara didn't speak. She didn't know jack shit about cabbages, murder or the way the rain squeezed its way through the back door during thunderstorms. She just watched him, as always.

 

Cara never spoke. You know why? Because she was a DOG! That's right, a goddamn dog! Paws and teeth and the whole damn nine yards. And there wasn't a damn thing to be done about it, not a damn thing. Not tonight, not with the way things were.

 

Kane looked at the paper umbrella in his glass, pink flowers on a yellow background. He shook his head. They had to be crazy. Had to be. Damn them.

 

"We do it to ourselves Cara, you know that? That's the worst kind of damage. And we ask for it. Every goddamn time. Every damn last one of us."

 

She knew it to. Not that she’d say. Not with her being a damn dog, as was previously explained.

 

Kane thought about how he didn't know where all this was going. Not a damn idea. Sometimes he felt like a character in a joke story written by a procrastinating author who didn't have the damn sense he was born with. A cabbage murderer. That was a joke all right. A bad one.

 

Whoever the author was he should have been getting on with his real novel, not writing nonsense about some damn cop with a sore shoulder who couldn't sleep at night. He needed to stop and get on with his novel. The real one. He really did. What was the damn guy thinking?

 

That author needed to end things quickly. Kane saw a cabbage sitting behind Cara. "Figures," he thought.

 

This was ridiculous. Procrastination by some omniscient narrator. He wasn't achieving a damn thing. Not a goddamn thing. And it was late. 2.30 in the morning in Scotland.

 

Something needed to put an end to it. Kane looked out the window. A huge asteroid burned a trail across the pale blue sky.

 

"Yeah, that oughta do it," he said to Cara and the cabbage. That goddamn cabbage. He finished his drink, gulping the milk down like some crazy baby cow.

 

The asteroid struck the Earth, destroying Cara, the cabbage, Kane and the milk in his stomach.

 

Horton too, the crazy bastard, heading home by subway, shelling peas while dressed as a goddamn bullfighter. Kane had to love the guy, dead though they both were. Hell, who wasn't?

 

The damn story was over. Hell, it had hardly started. But who ever cared about damn details like that?

 

And if there was some cosmic author he'd wasted 30 minutes he didn't have on the story. But didn't Cara deserve it? And Kane? And that crazy bastard Horton? Sure. Why not?

 

And the next day the sun rose on a scorched, dead Earth. And the wind whistled through the dead trees. If anyone had been there to hear it would have sounded like, "What are you doing? Get on with the novel! Stop wasting time on the cabbage thing, It's kinda weird, seriously."

 

But nobody was there. Because the Earth was destroyed as we established earlier. And there was no reason for the author, if he existed, to still be writing this post-apocalyptic cabbage crime novel. He should be getting on with the real one. What was he thinking? Seriously.

 

But maybe somewhere there was a child, stumbling out of a subway station. A child shielded from the blast by the body of some crazy bastard dressed as a bullfighter, unlikely as that sounds. And as she ate some peas she had found she stumbled out into a new world, her world.

 

And she found a book lying on the ground.

 

A book about a young boy who lived in a hotel in Portpatrick with his mother, who was strangely distant, and his Uncle Joe, who cared greatly for the boy, though that might not always be obvious. And she decided to read it.

 

She read about a terrible war, heartbreak, loss and choices that had to be made. And a boy who sometimes drew the wrong conclusions, wished for the wrong things, and couldn't always see what was really important. Because he was just a child, after all, like we all were once.

 

She realised the book wasn't just about a boy and hotel, and people who were trying their best to protect him from a war which was never as far away as they thought. It was about everything, about growing up, about getting things wrong and helping people and letting them down.

 

And she cried and she laughed and she learned things. She couldn't know that the book had taken over a decade to write. That there were two more about the same boy and his struggle to make a place for himself in a world that was slowly dying.

 

And she was glad that someone had written the book and published it. And she would have been glad that they had written two more and edited and published them, instead of wasting time on a stupid story about a murderous cabbage which was only seen by his 34 followers, if that.

 

And maybe the author hadn't wasted all that time because just one person had liked it. But then again, maybe that wasn't the book she found because maybe the author didn't really ever publish it.

 

Maybe he got tired of rejection and gave up.

 

Maybe he decided to self-publish but couldn't face it. He couldn't face websites and ISBN numbers and covers and editing and a hundred other things. Maybe it was too overwhelming. So he didn't.

 

He just sat writing more and more books forever. And it was a bit of a waste.

 

But we'll leave the girl there with her book. Whatever it really is. Hopefully she does OK in the post apocalyptic hellscape she now inhabits, sitting there reading her book as behind her a charred cabbage rolls towards where she is sitting...