The Okra Intercession

The other day one of my housemates boiled some okra. My other two housemates are teachers in the public school system, and were out for the summer. It was my housemate, the okra, and I. He was boiling the okra in a sauce pan, stirring it blandly with a wooden spoon. It boiled for about twenty minutes before he turned the gas out from under it.

"Try one," he said, "it's okra... it's good..."


He tried to feed it to me from the wooden spoon. I took the okra with my fingers and put it in my mouth. I chewed it, using the tongue to explore the flavor. The little green piece of vegetable released some of its familiar flavor, then it proceeded to fill my mouth with slime. It wasn't natural.

I spit it out onto a napkin. It was disgusting. I researched the subject in the internet. Many warned about the slime released in boiling okra. I came to find out a posteriori, of course. As I was about to inform my housemate about what I had just experienced and learned, he took the wooden spoon with two or three pieces of okra and put it in his mouth.

The look in my face must have been half awed and half disgusted. He chewed and swallowed, all the while staring calmly with a smirk on his face from his place in front of the gas stove. "I actually like the way it tastes..." he mumbled. 

It hit me at once why I liked it and he didn't:


He was gay and I wasn't.

There is something not quite right with Mr. Ken. He smiles alot, but at all the wrong things. His taste in music is slightly off the mainstream or esoteric circles. His breakfast consists of a raw egg, orange juice and milk, in the same cup at once. I believe I once witnessed him feasting off raw liver. He reads books about people other people consider dangerous. He steals bicycles from amongst the donated items supporting local thrift stores. He cleans them and resells on the interweb. He does not enjoy being in the midst of multitudes. His breathing increases dramatically, his eyes roll in his face, and he tells you he needs to leave. Certain lights make his migraines act up. He picks up every penny he sees on the street however scratched it may be. He prefers to wash dishes than make a side for pot lucks, even when there is an electric dishwasher present. I'm not certain he finds the sea a peaceful body. The moon looks the other way on the nights he strays. His skin becomes translucent, his organs begin to show in places. After one hour of moonlight collection, he closes his eyes, draws in a deep breath, and almost immediately his body emits light. It is a dim, yellowish light, not quite amber. Light like the light from a fixture where insects have perished and dust has settled thickly. He has many pen pals which he writes and which write to him. They all discuss dreams they've dreamt in the hot nights of Summer. Once he sweat over a post card, and the sweat made some of the ink bleed to the point of incomprehension. He mailed it anyway. I never knew how to judge him: he could be highly practical or careless. Perhaps he was both.