The Misses Foo & Cockerill

Married Life

Miss Foo rummaged through a pile of detritus, tossing old batteries and broken guitar strings aside.

She was searching for something.

Finally she found an old torn window screen and held it up to the light.

"No," she said, "not quite," and she tossed it aside. She rummaged again and extracted a camera lens. Again she held it up to her eye, looking through the lens. Not finding what she was looking for, she dashed it against the wall. A third time she fell into the pile, this time crawling about on her hands and knees, scattering the trash around the room in fits.

"Something! There must be something!" she yelled.

Then she stopped. She plucked a suction cup from the top of the pile.

"Yes," she said. "Oh yes!" she cried triumphantly.

And with a Foo-ish grin, she hopped off the pile and began to work.

"Now," she said, "all I need is a brain."

Everything was falling perfectly into place for Miss Foo. Her plan was coming along nicely. She had her puppet and she had her test subject and, deep in the basement, she had a nameless menace that lurked under a dark sheet. All she needed was to convince Miss Cockerill to get on board, which shouldn't have been too difficult. Of course Miss Foo didn't need Miss Cockerill, but it would make things much easier.

The daft woman, however, was being uncharacteristically stubborn.

They were sitting around the kitchen table, Miss Foo picking her nails with a butcher's cleaver, discussing Eli's fate.

"He's MY husband," said Miss Cockerill, "and I want him to trim my scrapbook. Look, I've even got my pinking shears out!" She waved the shears in front of Miss Foo's face.

"Alright, alright, put them away already." Miss Foo could not tolerate the color pink. "You can have him first. But remember, I need him fresh later."

Miss Cockerill put the shears down and picked up a spatula.

"Well alright then," she said. "Do you want me to make you some of that Sheep's-head Soup that you like so much?"

"Go on then."

Miss Cockerill was extremely fond of cooking, though she had no talent for it whatsoever. She had never read a cookbook, often mixed ingredients that had no business being together (just that morning she had made tuna fish pancakes), and couldn't tell the difference between a parsnip and a parrot. Actually, she had once tried to boil a parrot thinking it was a parsnip, but the parrot had made such a fuss as she was shoving it in the pot, that Miss Cockerill finally gave up. But then Miss Foo got her hands on it. After that the toucan's skeleton hung in the Hall of Trophies. But that's another story.

Miss Cockerill constantly experimented with new ingredients and recipes. Ingredients and recipes that you or I would never consider, technically, as food. She was especially fond of using insects, as they were in ready supply around the house.

Luckily for Miss Cockerill and her cooking, Miss Foo had the palate of a goat, a sick goat, a sick goat with an inner ear infection, and the more perverse the dish, the more likely she was to relish it. Miss Foo was only too happy to let Miss Cockerill do the cooking, even cherished the strange flavors and bizarre ingredients. She claimed that they helped build character. Character is not something that Miss Foo needed more of.

"Do we have any of that fermented beet juice left? That stuff really cleans the mucus out of the nose."

Miss Cockerill opened a bottle and placed it in front of Miss Foo. "But I don't understand what you need the Weevil for."