Summary
In a kitchen that breathes like a lung, George—white-jacketed, eyelids twitching—conducts a lunatic ballet around a single, sentient oyster who has apparently mastered the art of emotional blackmail. The bivalve clicks its shell like castanets, demanding jazz records, candlelight, and the tenderest of lettuces; George, terrified of offending the mollusk’s delicate palate, pirouettes between saucepans, whispering apologies to the creature as though it were a temperamental duchess. Enter Lillian, cigarette cocked like a raised eyebrow, convinced the chef’s infatuation with his briny companion is a symptom of capitalism’s final stage: anthropomorphised seafood. She attempts to seduce George away from his salt-water Svengali, brandishing a bottle of Tabasco like a horseman’s sabre. George counters with a roux so seductive it moans; the oyster, jealous, ejects a pearl that rolls, ominously, toward the gas burner. What follows is a three-act fugue of splattering béchamel, Freudian slippage, and a chiaroscuro climax inside a walk-in freezer where the temperature drops to the exact decimal at which desire solidifies. When the oyster finally croons a husky sea-shanty of surrender, George must decide whether to serve it on crushed ice or set it free in the midnight tide, knowing that either choice will leave him permanently shucked.
Synopsis
George is a chef whose main occupation consists in keeping on friendly terms with a trained oyster.
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