Vesuvius

You’re a terrible cook, and I assign you to cut vegetables, mostly to get you out of the way.
I think you realize this, because you look hurt, but in a playful way.
Your fingers grasp the knife and it looks
grotesque
in your dainty hands.
The blade emerges near the small ring on your index finger, and

lands
far away from its intended target.
“Practice swing,” a chuckle and a giggle, combined into one, joins the kitchen cacophony.
This chorus is not loud, but it contains the sounds that you think only you can hear:
the buzzing of the toaster
the glowy hum of the muted tv
the bubbling urgency of the boiling water.
You finally start dicing and I’m actually impressed, the knife moves deftly
back
and forth
and back
and forth
and back
and forth
and you turn it and begin on the other side, making cubes that are not really cubes but some other geometric anomaly like a rhombus or something like that.
Taking them into your hand you shake them into separate pieces, and they are ready to go.
Instead of tipping them out of your hands so that they slide slimily into the bowl,
You toss them up, and they arch out, their trajectory sending them flying.
They burst out like chunks of lava, landing squatly on the onions, holding them in place.
“Hey,” I call.
“Hm?” she replies, distracted.
“If we were in Pompeii,
do you think that we would run like fools,
trying to escape our lava-y doom,
or would you stand next to me,
so we could burn into oblivion blissfully?”
She looks up from her petrified pieces of onion, trying to see if I’m serious.
She reads my face, but I’m not sure what she sees.
She smirks and replies,
“Vesuvius!”