The true guilty culprit of pain & recession.

Chaiyo lifted his head from his folded arms and looked around him, blinking. There were nine others that the dawn mist rising from the Andaman Sea granted him to see. All cutting the same silhouette; heads down at rest and led on their stomachs, facing the bows of the long boats.
Chaiyo peeked over the side of his vessel, following the line of his net down into the water, hoping to glimpse flashes of silver wide eyes, deep below. Instead, his own eyes stared back at him from the lily-pond still, black onyx surface.
The sea afforded rich pickings for Chaiyo and the men of the town, but since The Company had arrived, things seemed to change.
The Company had offered the town’s fisherman good prices for their fruits of their labour, but in return restricted the amount the fishermen could make from their floating market sales.
In recent months, The Company had started taking less and less from Chaiyo and in return, paying less and less too.

He thought of his wife, Nim.
Nim would be making her way down the steep stony track from their hillside corrugated iron ‘shack’ about now, ready to catch The Company bus to her job.
That horrible, packed, smelly, damp, noisy, bus.
Nim worked for The Company too, almost everyone in the town was employed by The Company in one way or another. Nim bleached paper at a pulping plant. The workers never really knew what became of the paper as it left the factory in vats on huge green, shiny, corporate trucks, but it was assumed by the ladies of the factory that it went off to be made into packaging for The Company’s products.
600 people had been laid off from that factory in recent months; Chaiyo prayed that Nim wouldn’t be next.

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Standing at her vast oak kitchen table in New Orleans, and surveying the faces of three generations of female family members around her, something niggled at Alice.
The spices hung thick the air, waiting to unleash an assault on the senses of anyone who dare visit; the table awash with bowls, bottles and tubs.
Spice wasn’t the only thing hanging in the air that morning…..

Louisia, the little girl, spoke:
“Momma, should I go get ready for Church?”
“You know we can’t make it to Church today honey. This bourbon arrived late, we must get this finished before Daddy gets home, you know how Daddy likes dinner at six…”.
Alice’s Mother scowled at her from behind her gold rimmed glasses.
“You haven’t been for months, you well know that the congregations flailing. Minister Cross looks ill……and it’s no good for the child..”
Alice sighed deeply and rubbed her furrowed temple, feeling guilty. Silence ensued.

The Company Man had sat at that very table some months earlier, clutching a piece of paper in his clammy white hand. Upon the paper were some scrawled ingredients, and buzzwords. Words like ‘Deep South’ and ‘Creole’.
The Man had wanted an ‘authentic’ recipe for a glaze, and The Company had paid for him to be flown across the state to acquire one, as cheaply as possible. The people of the town had pointed him to Alice, almost famous for her sticky back ribs at the local fetes and festivals.
Alice was loathed to give the man her secret family recipe and she now worked for The Company too, as a ‘Consultant Supplier’.

Going to Church was time that Alice could ill afford, along with so many others in the town, now that The Company employed nearly everyone in it.

Grandma Serephina piped up again:
“No good will come of it, mark my words”.

A mile off shore, a storm brewed.


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‘Grrr! always the one with the dodgy bloody wheel!’

Rowan furrowed her brow under her bobble hat and stuck her bottom lip out firmly, pressing onwards across The Company’s car park.
‘Not bad enough is it….’ she grumbled to herself, ‘…….that I have to go amongst the great unwashed masses, but now I’ll be audibly making an entrance. Great’.

Rowan was antisocial to the extreme, a social pariah. She knew it. Other people amazed her with their mixture of stupidity and ignorance. She chose to spend time alone and was, for the most part, quite happy that she wasn’t simmering on the very edge of telling it how it was at all times.
A quiet life, not suffering fools, was a good life for Rowan; she never could quite understand most people’s logic.

Rowan had friends, sure. The type of friends who had very much their own lives and occasional meetings with them was all the sweeter for not having to listen to their every trial and tribulation day after day after day. She, at times, seemed to be a sponge for negative emotion, soaking in others problems, yet powerless to make things better.
Unfortunately, her supply of general household items had run low and it had reached the point to which this horrible job must be undertaken. She hoped it was quiet. She especially hoped she didn’t run into anyone she knew and would have to stop to talk.

Rowan stepped back outside into the night air with her now full trolley and shuffled around for her mobile in her bag.

“Hello Sally? It’s Rowan…..listen, I’m having a dinner party, and everyone’s invited!.......……..”

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The man in the suit at McDougalls went over the books again and again and again. No one seemed to want their flour anymore….
The woman sat in head office at Wine Rack, reclined in her chair and threw her pen down. Sales were down 40%.
The fishmonger leant on the counter staring out of the window onto the empty high street, and the butcher from across the road studied his braising steak, considering its green sheen for a moment.
The hospitals and doctors surgeries were busy. Strained, understaffed, under funded and seemingly, under loved.

************************************************** *******************

In Edinburgh, Rowan surveyed her sideboard. 14 bottles of wine. Why the hell had everyone brought wine!?!
‘Still’, she thought, ‘I’ll put it away and pass it off back to them. Ha.’
‘In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if these bloody bottles have done the rounds for the past 12 months anyhow’.
They had. Every soiree, every candlelight supper, party and gathering. Those 14 bottles had had a better social life than she had.
Rowan headed for the kitchen, and reached for the individual mini prawn wontons. There was a time when she’d buy a whole bag of prawns, not anymore!
As she switched the oven on Chaiyo and Nim huddled together in the darkness.
As she reached for the bite size bourbon coated sticky ribs, a million prayers went up in New Orleans as the wave hit. Prayers said too late.
As Rowan slid the 24 miniature pork Toad in the Hole out of their box, the butcher threw a rope over the solid wooden beam in his dark, cold garage, and as Sally mused about how ‘retro’ a full dressed salmon now was, and popped the last miniature spicy whitebait into her mouth, the fishmonger staggered to his car, holding half a bottle of scotch.

All over Great Britain, thousands of gatherings went off the same way, in warm houses, behind rose surrounded doors and without a piece of cutlery being soiled anywhere.

Destruction, recession, and pain now reigned across the world.

The culprit? Miniature-bite size, individual, party food.