O-Day
Have you ever seen an onion bleed?
Before all this started I’d found it bizarre that there was this wet residue on the chopping board when I’d finished dicing an onion.
Always red ones, never white – then a preference, these days generally a hope more than anything.
But they never struck me as being especially wet vegetables.
I have seen an onion bleed. And it wasn’t on a chopping board.
Lost in this thought as the dawn light creaks through the kitchen window, I stir from what I now realise was a half-sleep. I was meant to be on guard.
As I do every morning, I briefly wonder if O-Day was just some unnecessarily bizarre dream, or a particularly powerful acid flashback.
Angelo strolls in from the living room smoking a cigarette. God knows where he found it. Moving from house to house as we are, we’re lucky to find running water, let alone tobacco products. I didn’t even know Angelo smoked.
“Been eight years, three months and three days since I had one of these,” Angelo says, as if reading my mind. Somewhere beneath his faintly psychotic beard – rest assured, it was overgrown long before shaving became a low priority – is a grimace.
“Good for the hunger pangs,” I say, realising how incredibly dreary a response this would be even if I wasn’t merely repeating what a Big Issue seller had told me once. Before O-Day, obviously.
Angelo’s watery blue eyes never show a hint of judgement, and he lets my lack of insight breeze by without comment.
They do seem more watery than usual though. Almost like he’s…
Crying.
“Wake up, gents,” I start as Steele pokes his head round the other doorframe. Bastard’s as silent as a cat even coming from the first floor, and those are some loud, creaky stairs.
“Thought my eyes were stinging,” says Angelo, a grim determination in his voice.
“The red menace approaches,” says Steele, exaggerating his already upper class accent. It sounds like Angelo’s impression of him.
Ignoring my protesting knees as I lever myself upright, I peek through the gap in the curtains. A small swarm of reds is approaching the house, their gills rippling in the morning sun. They’ve caught our scent.
Red onions are never as much of a worry, relatively speaking. They’re smaller, sweeter and easier to deal with than their white counterparts – that was true before O-Day anyway, but ‘dealing with’ an onion using a knife was plenty easier before they started fighting back.
“Found one in a trap late last night,” says Steele, his voice as hard as his namesake. “Was only a scout. Must have squirted some pheromones before I caught it.”
Steele’s traps are quite ingenious, and a few of them are snared in the front garden already. They hiss and rupture.
I’m watching an onion bleed.
“Oh shit,” spits Angelo. “Oh shit.” I know what he’s about to say well before the words drip out of his quivering mouth.
“It’s a white.”