The Sly Pie
Just a short story .....
THE SLY PIE
With their origins in antiquity, pies have been around for a very long time. The ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the medieval English and the French all had their own variations of “the pie”. Just like all fads, various pie fillings come and go. Some, even, would not be accepted today. Think the “four and twenty blackbirds” pie, the crow pie and, in Australia the “cocky” pie. Necessity breeds invention apparently, but these fillings would not pass the pub test in today’s world.
Form and function unite perfectly together in the baking of every pie. Convenient, fast, tasty, sweet, big, small, handy and quick to make and quick to devour. Easily weaponised, they serve as a useful tool for getting a message across from those who choose to hurl one at someone or something.
Yet, no matter how a pie is made, or what its filling is, perhaps the most important is the sly pie. Let me explain.
Every few days a man parks his car in the small and rather tight parking area that provides access to the several shops packed tightly in a small curve on the corner of intersecting streets. He curses having to reverse park, all the while knowing that getting his car out will be easier than parking it.
Each time he arrives at the shopping precinct he is a man on a mission. He doesn’t have a sweet tooth, but every now and again, he likes to buy a couple of custard tarts for his wife. She thinks the ones made at the bakery are simply the best of any she has eaten. The man will buy more than he needs, or than what his wife will eat, knowing that some will go to her elderly friends, not because they can’t buy their own, but because generosity never hurt anyone. A custard tart is likely to brighten anyone’s day.
As the man approaches the counter in the bakery, he pauses in front of it, waiting his turn to be served. He idles the time away by browsing the delectables in the counter display cabinets.
He says to the baker’s server “Could I please have four custard tarts and 4 of those apple slices?”
“Sure” the server says, and busies himself with two square containers, one which he fills with the custard tarts and the other with the apple slices. He carefully places the two cartons into two separate bags, places them on the counter top and asks the man “Would you like something else?”
“Mmmm” the man muses. “Yes. I will have a pie please. I shouldn’t though, you know. If she finds out the missus will tell me off for not watching my diet. But bugger it. Let’s go for it.”
“What pie would you like?” asks the server, as he points to a menu board of about 12 different pie fillings. “Oh, just a plain meat pie will do” the man says.
“Do you want sauce?” the server asks. “No” the man says. “Why spoil a perfectly good pie?”
“More money for us” the server explains.
The man chuckles, pays up and walks out to his car. On his way he notices an elderly lady hunched over a small wheeled walking frame. She was sitting at the table in front of the bakery. “Are you alright” he asks the lady. “Yes” she replies. “I am having a rest before I make my way home”.
He puts his bags of tarts and slices and the lone pie on the table. He removes a custard tart and an apple slice and places them on the seat of the lady’s walker frame. “I bought too many of these” he tells the lady. “You take these with you and have them with a cup of tea when you get home”. The lady protests at first but accepts his generosity. It has been ages since anyone offered her a cake.
He continues to his car, puts the tarts and slices in a safe place on the floor, takes the pie halfway out of its bag, holding it gently so as not to break the plain and unremarkable looking casing, and starts his car. “Ah that pie smells really good” he says to himself.
He can’t wait to take a first bite, but there are some considerations that need to be taken into account. He knows that, if he is to avoid critical comments of his missus about his diet and waist line, there must be no evidence of its consumption by the time he gets home. There must be no stains on his shirt front from the delectable gravy drowning the simple meat filling, no crumbs from the truly heavenly pastry holding everything in place, no dots of pie on the corners of his mouth. And no tell-tale bag as well. He knows that he has not more than a kilometre of distance in which he must eat the pie.
Having steered his car onto the road, and moving slower than usual, he lifts the pie one handed to his mouth. He opens his lips widely, moves the pie forward and bites down. There is a wondrous rush of just the right heat cosseting a concatenation of flavours, textures and smells that brought to his memory all that a pie should be. Slowly, bite by bite, he devours the pie. He crumples up the now empty bag and throws it to the floor of the car, where it rests with others. He wipes his hand over his lips, brushes down his shirt front and licks his lips to savour the last morsels of taste.
He pulls into his driveway and turns off the car’s engine.
To no-one in particular he says “there is one thing that nothing can beat, and that is a sly pie.”
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