You Can't Trust a Spoon

         When you look at a clean spoon the image it reflects will bend and stretch unnaturally. It will look back at you, almost mockingly, and taunt you, playing with your perception and baffling your psyche, making you wonder if the world behind you really looks that way until the last moment before you turn to look, or if it’s all just a clever illusion. Looking into a spoon can be amusing; it can be sad, frustrating, or just plain irritating. Then there’s that face you see, the one that’s yours but it’s not. Sometimes you’re drawn to it, other times you just want to avoid eye contact and turn away as if it were some freakishly distorted deformity that seems as unreal as a character in a story book, then there are the times you just want to smash it beneath the sole of your shoe and forget it ever was. What gives a spoon the right to be so free and uncaring, anyway? What a cocky utensil; always so smug, nothing at all like a fork or knife. They, at least, have some dignity. For instance, you would never catch a knife throwing vague versions of the truth around like they were common knowledge to all; as if what was not, really was. At least a knife has the class to tell it the way it is, real straight shooters, they. And a fork! What elegance! It says not a word and goes about its daily work as any good utensil should. But that spoon; the nerve it has. Sometimes they even have the arrogance to get together and clack about as if they were some fancy musical instrument. A knife and fork would never behave in such a way; too civilized, they. You just can’t trust a spoon, that’s all there is to it. Were it not for soup, we’d hardly have need of them at all. As for that, why not just sip a soup from a cup as the eastern cultures do? Surely any dishwasher would agree. No, a spoon must never be trusted. I don’t know why I talk to them anyway; they never make a lick of sense.