In Cold Blood

There's pandemonium in the fridge when we learn that Nina and her boyfriend are dead.

Everyone's trying to speak at once, there’s yelling and wobbling and jiggling coming from every container and compartment. “We have a killer among us!”, crows the leftover Chicken Casserole. The Tomatoes roll about, red-faced, in the bottom bin. “Mon Dieu!”, exclaims Camembert. Only Yoghurt stays silent, but then he usually just meditates or writes haikus in his corner. Orange Juice, though, can barely contain herself in her carton. She feels vindicated because she was the first to raise the alarm.

"I told you something was wrong when Nina didn’t come down for breakfast!", OJ yells, her carton wiggling so vehemently that my egg tray on the fridge door’s top shelf starts to rattle.

But Orange Juice is right. We all know Nina never fails to make an appearance in the kitchen at exactly 7.15 in the morning, still in her nightie, eyes half closed, reaching into the fridge to grab Orange Juice. No one could recall a time when it wasn't so. Until today.

Today, the fridge door remained shut well past Nina's breakfast time, and when it did open, it wasn't her pillow-creased cheeks in the door frame but the stern faces of two detectives.

They seized us all up with a look before exchanging a knowing glance.

“Send the whole thing to forensics”, said one of them. The other nodded and mumbled something about arsenic and an autopsy.

Pickles, whose multiple onion eyes never miss a detail, later said he could identify their insignia: an Inspector and a Sergeant. I caught a glimpse of something else through the kitchen window: two body bags being loaded onto a van.

Then the door thumped shut again, and the yelling began.

“How do we know it wasn’t accidental food poisoning?” asks Lettuce, as if we hadn’t all heard the detectives talk about arsenic. Lettuce is a bit soft in the head, if you ask me.

But the question inspires a moment of silence, broken by the dark, velvety voice of Chocolate Cake:

“Darling, are you insinuating one of us here is past their prime?”

Lettuce simpers at no one in particular. Pepper tries to make a joke about Camembert being suspiciously stinky, but nobody’s laughing.

“There's a killer among us!’, screams the leftover Chicken Casserole again. The Tomatoes resume their ominous tumbling, Orange Juice starts to sob, and mayhem threatens to bubble over again.

I mean, this is meant to be a refrigerator, but sometimes you could mistake it for the great mixing bowl of hell.

It takes Pickles to calm everyone down. He doesn't need to yell, he just stares at us with his many unblinking onion eyes until we're shamed into silence. Pickles has been around longer than any of us. He's not as cultured as Yoghurt, but Yoghurt seldom shares his thoughts besides the occasional haiku. Whereas Pickles is the embodiment of cool reassurance in a 500 ml jar.

We resolve to stay calm and focus on the facts.

"Yesterday was Nina’s birthday", says the Chicken Casserole. "She celebrated with her boyfriend. I was right there, on the table, I saw them kiss and clink their champagne glasses."

"A-ha! That Moët!", pipes up Camembert from the middle shelf. "Mesdames et messieurs, I reckon we ‘ave found ze killer!"

Awkward silence follows.

The cheese and the champagne have been feuding for as long as we’ve known them. It started with some disagreement over the exact words to the Marseillaise, continued with Camembert calling Moët “a brute”, and culminated in the champagne popping the ultimate insult: that the cheese wasn’t really from Normandy, and therefore he wasn’t an actual Camembert but a mere brie.

“Come on, ‘Bert”, says Pickles, “that’s pure speculation. Besides, Moët is no longer here to defend himself.”

“Which doesn’t mean he’s innocent”, the cheese continues to insist, but he’s interrupted by Orange Juice:

“What about the Casserole? She’s just admitted she was there, at the crime scene!”

“Objection!”, yells Casserole. “I didn’t admit anything! I was their dinner, but I didn’t poison them!”

“Says you!”

“Why, take a bite if you don’t believe me!”

No one takes Casserole up on her offer, so the investigation comes to a standstill. But not for long.

“Actually”, the feeble voice of Lettuce calls out again. “There was someone else at that dinner party last night!”

Lettuce makes a dramatic pause before adding a single triumphant “Her!”, while flapping her self-important, wet leaves in the general direction of the Chocolate Cake.

“That’s… true!” gasps the Chicken Casserole, seemingly shocked by her own realisation.

We all turn to Cake.

Her only concern is holding her cherry crown at an angle so that it glows in the refrigerator bulb’s light (and yes, it stays on when the door is closed. We’ve rigged it.)

“But of course I attended the birthday dinner. I was made for a festive occasion. To be a delicious gift, adorned by candles and wrapped in laughter. To be the dark, sumptuous taste of romance.”

Lettuce sneers.

The Tomatoes’ ominous rambling intensifies. Pickles blinks with his many eyes.

“We ‘ave identified a new suspect!”, declares Camembert.

“Before you get too carried away”, continues Cake, “let me remind you that I was brought to dinner by Nina’s boyfriend himself. He bought me in the patisserie down the road from his house.”

Cake pauses for effect. I secretly admit to myself that the way she pronounces patisserie makes me wobbly inside my shell. Camembert’s French accent never does that.

“But that doesn’t make sense”, says Casserole. “Unless the boyfriend wanted to poison Nina and himself, in a sordid act of murder-suicide.”

“I rest my case”, says Cake, adjusting her cherry crown.

“I never liked that boyfriend”, pouts Lettuce, unable to recognise when she’s been defeated.

“You don’t know the half of it”, responds someone from way back. Someone whose voice nobody can identify at first.

A forgotten can of beer, buried deep in an uncharted corner of the fridge. Snoozing peacefully until now.

“Sorry to butt in”, says Beer, “but you might want to know that Nina wasn’t Rob’s only girlfriend.

For a second, everyone just stares at Beer. All you can hear is the soft humming of the refrigerator. Then all hell breaks loose. Shouting, rattling, yelling, crying, screaming. The Tomatoes are so agitated they’re barely solid anymore. Orange Juice blows her screw cap and spills over. There’s lightning and thunder in every one of Pickles’ onion eyeballs.

“What do you mean she wasn’t his only girlfriend?”, whimpers Lettuce.

“Just that, really. I mean, I’d lived in his fridge for weeks, before he brought me and my mates over for that football game a few weeks ago. But back home, Rob shared his fridge and his kitchen with a different girl. Not this Nina chick who lived over here.”

“How could you tell?”, groans Lettuce, clearly grasping at straws.

“Just completely different stuff in the fridge”, says Beer. “She never had orange juice for breakfast, for example. She liked strawberry smoothies, and instead of pickles, she had a big jar of Maraschino cherries.”

“Oh la la!”, says Camembert.

“The two-timing bastard!”, wails Casserole. “Poor Nina had no idea! You should’ve seen him, romancing her last night, holding her hand and whispering in her ear!”

“It’s called having your cake and eating it”, says the velvety voice of Cake.

We all turn to look at her, sitting pompously on her plate.

With a bright red cherry on top of her smooth, dark icing.

We all observe a moment of solemn, dramatic silence for the last time.

“Chocolate Cake, you are under arrest!” Camembert finally announces. “You are ze killer of Nina and Rob! And you were foiled by a can of Beer!”

“Technically, I’m the murder weapon”, says Cake. “The killer is the other girl who works at the bakery down the road from Rob’s house, and likes Maraschino cherries.”

I think she added that last bit for Lettuce’s benefit, just in case she was still confused.

A few hours later, the fridge door opens again, and the Inspector and the Sergeant grab Chocolate Cake and put her in an evidence bag. Then they go away.

We are all feeling a bit deflated, and no one knows what to say, so we just sit in our compartments, listening to the refrigerator humming. Even Pickles seems at a loss for words.

Finally, Yoghurt shares a haiku that he’s written, and this is how our day ends:

Betrayed by cherries

A girl and a chocolate cake

Both gone forever.