This is how the chili crumbles...

I entered the kitchen, with an air of anticipation, to prepare the evening tea, while mama was busy with some other chores. It is pretty unusual for me to be home on a weekend around tea time. Usually I am away running some errands, or sleeping through the summer heat until the sun goes down. Quite obviously today was an exception. Not only I was at home, wide awake, but I was also going to do something for mama.

So there I was, walking past the familiar yet alienated appliances that furnish the place. The lights were off, and the only facilitator of visibility was dim, suffocated sunlight, escaping through the window, shadowed by a tree in the backyard. While walking towards the cooking range, I noticed a tray full of homegrown freshly plucked Green Chili Peppers on the shelf. I felt happy to see there was plenty of them. It had been a while we had not been able to find any from the market, with so much aroma and taste. When I stepped right past the tray towards the range, I stepped on something that cracked under my foot, with a squishy feeling under the shoe. I swore under the breath, for having stepped on one of the peppers I was just so reverently praising a moment ago.

A bigger concern was mama's anticipated reaction on the mess that was now lying on the floor. So I had to clean it up. Which meant I needed more light. I decided not to turn back, and continued walking to the cooking range. After switching on the lamp in the hood, I turned around to take a look at the damage I had caused to the poor pepper. What I saw was a little confusing... there was no pepper on the floor. I stared sheepishly on the still dimlit floor, pondering on the fact that the crack I heard was definitely not of a roach getting killed under my foot, and even if it was, it was hard to believe it could've crawled out of sight after enduring the weight of a 210 pound monster that I am.

Tea had lost the priority now, I wanted to find out what I had stepped on, and where it had gone! So I walked across the kitchen, switched on all the lamps there are in the kitchen, and started searching the floor again.

For a few seconds, I did not register anything unusual on the brown marble chips flooring. But then I saw it. The pepper was there, but it had turned a very unusual color of beige, and it had its head and tail raised in the air, eyes wide open, shining like tiny orbs of onyx, with absolute pain and shock. It turned its head clockwise, where I was standing, in a very slow motion, just like a robotic replica of a Jurrasic dinosaur would move. It probably did not like what it saw, and I guess did not want to die looking at the monster who killed it. So the head turned the other way, even slower this time, and apparently, running out of life before reaching the desired position, it collapsed half way through, and never moved again.

The beige pepper was dead, a couple of tiny red droplets shone on the floor beside its belly. I looked away, uncertain if I was sorry or actually disgusted, on the sight of a lizard I had just killed.
I never knew before today, that lizard blood was also red...

I did not have the heart neither the gut to deal with gruesome stuff, so I chose to face the music on not cleaning up the mess. Made a mental note to make sure I did not step on the corpse again, and continued with the tea. Mama told me it tasted good, before I told her about the misadventure.

For some reason, the tea did not taste as great as mama had put it... and she also told me the gardner had removed all the green chili peppers from the backyard, the season was over! He planted pink roses this time!