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((Warning for (non-gory) dead animals!))

Busy day today for Gredya.

First she's in the kitchen, putting up one more freezer bag of meat. That's enough for now, she thinks: she's filled one shelf, a cache for the hardest times of winter. She has another bag, marked again with a note like last time: Ganibal Leckter. You see this before? Gredya. It'll wait for him at one end of the bar if he doesn't happen to show up. Inside--if anyone cares to snoop on Lecter's mail!--is a smallish dog-like creature (deceased) with a forked tail-tip and oddly squared-off ears.

Once she's taken care of that, she heads outside with a stack of books. It's not just her adult-literacy text now. She's expanding her reading material.

(And she's botherable in either location!)

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"Yes, just so," Dr. Lecter says, watching her. "Your draw the thin blade through the food you are cutting."

It's less...stabby...than she had expected, and she wonders whether handling a knife like this is any kind of practice for handling one in a fight. In any case she perseveres, fiercely slicing tomatoes. "You have many different ones," she observes, with a little nod at the collection.

"Yes, most of them for cutting meat and cleaving through bones," Dr. Lecter says. "I need to take the carcass apart before putting it into the marinade."

Certainly. "All parts go in? Or you take out the organs?"

"I take out the organs," Lecter says. "I might use some of them separately, though."

"Some of the best parts," she says seriously.

"I know," Lecter says. "I will definitely be keeping the liver. I doubt I need the guts or the bladder, though, and may pass on the kidneys, too."

She tsks a bit at the waste of perfectly good kidneys. Oh, well. "It will make the rabbits fat," she concedes. "--What knife is good to cut bone?"

"The big cleaver," Hannibal says, pointing at it. "That allows me to hack through the bones."

"And this?" She points to another knife.

"It's a de-boning knife," Dr. Lecter says. "Long and thin, to slide along the bones."

Gredya nods appreciatively, and touches the handle just for a moment before stepping back. "I should let you work."

"You can continue cutting the tomatoes, if you like," Lecter says. "And ask all the questions you like."

All right. She proceeds with the tomatoes, slowly getting the hang of it. "How did you learn? Cooking, knives, all this."

"When I was young, from my uncle's cook," Dr. Lecter says. "It seemed to me one of the most civilised, and most ephemeral, of arts."

"Ephemeral?" Not a word she knows.

"Fleeting," Dr. Lecter says. "Something that is created only to last for a moment, or to be destroyed."

Gredya had not thought of cooking as an art; more as a way to complicate food. Now she pauses, knife-edge on a tomato. "You like that? Ephemeral?"

"Yes," Lecter says. "It's the art of enjoying that which only shares with us that one moment's pleasure, and then is gone forever."

Gredya stops slicing while she thinks about that. "...I do not like things that say look how easy I break. That kind of--ephemeral. But food is not the same."

"Sometimes, seeing the designated breaking points in a thing, or a person, makes them all the lovelier," Dr. Lecter says. "But no, food is not that kind of ephemeral. It is fleeting, not fragile."

She finishes slicing the tomatoes before answering, frowning in thought. "Children are like that," Gredya says finally. "But they grow fast. They stop being so--" So what? She can't find the words, and shrugs. "You are not so afraid about them."

And with that bit of vulnerability, she puts down the knife, disdaining protection. "Now what? For the marinade?"

"We'll peel and chop the garlic, and cut up the hot peppers," Dr. Lecter says. "And then mix everything together in that bowl."

Gredya nods. Peeling garlic is unfamiliar, but the peppers can't be too different from tomatoes, can they?

"Would you prefer cutting the garlic or the peppers?" Dr. Lecter promptly asks.