Cat Soup: A Cautionary Tale

Here’s something that actually happened to me a while back. Hopefully whoever reads this takes it as a warning not to make the same stupid mistakes I did.

It all started one morning while I was making myself some breakfast. Nothing fancy or anything. Just my usual scrambled eggs and toast. Well, stupid me: this morning I decided I was gonna switch things up a little. You know, step out of my comfort zone. Go out on a limb culinarily you might say. Boy, was I dense. If I had foreseen even a fraction of the unfortunate events that I was about to Rube-Goldberg-machine into motion, I never would have even so much as thought about doing what I was about to do. I would have just shut up, eaten my stupid eggs, and been done with it.

But nooooooooooooooooooooo. Of course I just had to go and make the stupidest move possible. Classic.

I sat down at the kitchen table. My little sister was already eating. She had a go-to breakfast too. A nice big bow of nuclear missiles and milk. Personally I try to stay away from all that sugary processed crud. But I guess that morning I had a bit of a hankering for some HFCS. “Hey,” I said to her as I took my seat, “ can you pass me the catsup?”

“The what?” She paused and looked at me like I was looney tunes. Bonafide nuts. Little did I know that the next few sorry days would end up proving her right.

“The catsup,” I repeated.

“You mean the ketchup? Gross. Since when have you liked ketchup on eggs?”

“Since right now. Can you just pass me the catsup already?”

“There. You said it again. Stop that.”

“Said what? Catsup?”

“Yes. It’s ketchup.”

“That’s what I said. Catsup.”

“You better stop saying that before…” She trailed off and just rolled her eyes and passed me the bottle, finally. “You really have it in for yourself, don’t you?”

“What are you talking about, you weirdo?”

She didn’t answer so I just shrugged and dug in.

Christ. How naive can you be? This naive apparently: later that day, I said it again. I was denser than reinforced steel. I just wouldn’t take the hint, even when it was coming from my best friend in the whole world.

“You pumped for our first game of the year tomorrow? I am so pumped for tomorrow!” It was after school, during practice. My best friend was leaning against the fence bordering the field like usual. I figured that was why everyone called him Fence, myself included, but I was never really sure. Either way, he never much liked hanging tight in the dugout where he belonged. I didn’t either. Me and him were watching the rest of the team practice fielding. We were the designated benchwarmers of the boys’ baseball team. Not to say the rest of the team was much better than us or anything. Last season we were 0 for 697, which was something like 500% more losses than games actually played. Don’t ask how we managed to screw up that badly. We were a statistical impossibility in all the worst ways.

“Don’t get your hopes up too high,” I told him. Fence had a tendency to do that and then inevitably come crashing down from the highs he’d hype himself into for no reason. “Oh, right. I am kinda hyped about something else though. I had some catsup on my eggs this morning, and it was actually pretty good. I think I’m gonna start eating them that way from now on. At least for a while.”

“Wait.” He locked eyes with me like I was crazy too, just like my sister had. Unfortunately, I’m so stupid that I didn’t pick up on the pattern at the time. Didn’t even put two and two together. “You had some what on your eggs?”

“Some… catsup?” I was confused.

“Dude!” He pulled me in close and started whispering in my ear. “Are you crazy?! Not so loud! They might hear you!”

“B-bro?” I extricated myself from his grip. “What the heck? What’s the big idea?”

“Look…” He looked to his left and his right, like he was trying to make sure no one was listening. Fortunately everyone else was busy practicing. Maybe if they weren’t, what happened later would’ve happened right then. I don’t know. “If you’re gonna say” — he tugged at his collar — “say the c-word, at least try not to be so loud and obvious about it. Not when you’re around me anyway. Wouldn’t want people to think I was the one flapping my gums that way.”

Well, I had exactly zero clue what he was talking about, so I just shrugged and changed the subject. It was the only smart play I made during all of this, and — classic me — it was a complete and total accident. The next day, I went right back to doing what I didn’t even know nobody was supposed to ever do.

“Hey, mom,” I said the next night at dinner. I was on a roll with my newfound ketchup craving and I wanted to stay rolling even though the condiment didn’t really go on the stuffed chicken mom had whipped up. My sister had recently decided she was vegetarian so that’s why we were eating plushies. “Can you pass me the catsup?”

Again with the looks of incredulity. “Only if you promise not to use that word in this household ever again,” my mom told me as she handed me the bottle.

“Yeah, bozo,” added my sister. “It’s ketchup. Stop saying it the other way if you know what’s good for you and the rest of us.”

After that she and my mom got into an argument over whether “bozo” was a rude word or not. I just sat there munching cotton and thinking, finally getting it through my titanium-dense skull that maybe people weren’t happy with how I was calling it “catsup.”

But did they really have the right to complain? After all, the pronunciation was exactly the same. I wasn’t saying it weird or anything. I was saying it just the same as anyone else. All that was different was the spelling.

Apparently people had the right to do a great deal more than just complain, as I would find out the next day. It was sixth period and I was sitting in language arts class. It was almost time to go home and, just my luck, I got called on to read the final paragraph before the bell rang. One tiny problem: I hadn’t been paying attention at all. All this time, I’d been letting my thoughts wander, mostly to what the right spelling of ketchup was — whether it was the k-way or the c-way. And what was so wrong with the c-way anyhow? That was what I wanted to know. I was too curious for my own good, you see. I would soon find out.

The teacher got mad at me. Not super mad really but just a little upset. I was trying to find where we were in the textbook and her glaring me down and some of the other kids laughing wasn’t making it any easier. She rolled her eyes. “Are you really going to waste the last few minutes of class as we wait for you to catch up?”

“Catch up?” I repeated. I muttered this quietly, so low I was sure no one else could hear it. That was always a habit of mine — a bad one as I was about to find out in a minute: I had this dumb tendency to whisper words I heard sometimes, just to twirl them around on my tongue a little, feel out their shapes in my mouth. Bad move. I kept whispering: “Huh. That sounds a little like… catsup.”

As soon as I said it, time froze. A cold silence settled over the room. Suddenly I could feel everyone staring at me and it felt weird and ticklish in a bad way, like I had a colony of ants crawling and wriggling around under my skin.

There was this wet sound when the teacher licked her lips and it seemed like she was choosing her words carefully. When she finally said something, “Did you just say what I think you just said?” was what she said.

“Wh-what?” Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. Just shut up and don’t say whatever you’re thinking of saying and you’ll be fine. If I could talk to my past self, that’s what I’d tell him. Let’s be honest though. He probably wouldn't listen. But I mean at this point even I knew something was horribly wrong and that I probably definitely should not say the word that I knew that everyone knew that I had said. But then I was like whatever man, who cares. What’s the worst that can happen? And I said it anyway.

“Catsup?”

My teacher’s eyes went as big as basketballs practically. They looked like they were making to leap out of her skull. Well something leapt alright. Her. As the entire class gasped at my utterance of the c-word, she dashed for the wall, dove for the fire alarm. No, wait, not the fire alarm, I realized. That other weird alarm that was next to the fire alarm. The one whose purpose nobody actually seemed to know. The one that looked just like a fire alarm but was, like, a deeper shade of red maybe. Yeah. Slightly darker red. It was the color of… the color of…

She pulled the alarm. A sixth of a second later a big black boot sunk into the door of the classroom with a deep thud, knocked it off its hinges from the outside. More boots trailed behind, drumming the tile as they entered the classroom, black and spotless and stinking of new boot smell.

It was some kind of paramilitary op, it looked like. A small detachment outfitted top to toe in riot gear and wielding big scary guns and batons. None of them seemed super happy, though maybe the ones who had tinted riot helmets on were smiling. I mean I don’t know. It’s a possibility.

The guy at the front of the pack started yelling. “Everybody get down! Get down now, bozos!!!”

Wow, I thought. They were even using swear words, according to my mom. They must really have it in for someone here.

Oh. Wait.

That someone was me.

“I said get down!!!!”

At this second command, everyone else hit the deck pronto, but I was too slow. I just sat there in my seat like an inert lump and awkwardly smiled.

“Now.” The guy talking had his mouth uncovered and I could see tiny rotten brown teeth growing out of gums rawer and redder than. Erm. Well. “We can do this the hard way” — there was the matte black blur of a pistol as he whipped it out of its holster, cocked it, finger on the trigger and itching to squeeze — “or we can do it the harder way. Which one of you said the word?”

Silence.

“I said which one of you said the word!!!!”

Everyone was cowering. Even the teacher. A couple seats over, Fence was trembling with his hands clasped around his covered head and his elbows pressing into the floor. “It was him! He was the one who said it!” he yelped from that position, pointing at me. Some friend. Oh well. Maybe he was still mad about that time I beat him at tic-tac-toe in the first grade and was trying to get back at me. Bit of an extreme reaction if so, not to mention horribly delayed.

And also it’s not like they didn’t know who did it anyway. It was obvious it was me. It was obvious I was the one who had screwed up one too many times. The one who just couldn’t call it ketchup like everystupidbody else.

The goons surrounded me where I sat, drew their weapons and trained them on me. I was scared at this point. Terrified. I was trying not to show it. I was probably failing.

“You sick, sick son of a bitch,” one of them said. Pretty rude of him to insult my mother for something she had nothing to do with. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

Nothing, so I didn’t say anything. I actually thought about just saying “catsup” again and seeing what would happen but even I’m not that much of an idiot.

“Talk!!!” another one screamed in my face.

That was when I noticed one of them was standing pretty bowlegged with an arch under his legs big enough to duck through if I was quick enough. Turned out I was. Yeah, I went for it, made my escape while surrounded by scary masked armed guys all jabbing their scary guns in my scared face. Pretty cool, right?

Wrong.

“After him!”

Saw that coming. But I was faster on the head start than they were on the catchup.

Ha! Later, suckers! I’ll be halfway to Helsinki before any of you can catch me with all that military gear weighing you down! Plus I have adrenaline on my side, baby!

That was what I thought anyway. In reality the rush wore off before I could even turn the corner down the hallway and if I didn’t have a gaggle of probably trained killers on my tail I probably would have stopped to catch my breath.

At the moment, all I could do was keep running, panting like a dog, half tripping over my own feet.

Jesus. I can’t tell if that’s just sad or utterly pathetic. Cause it’s one of the two. No wonder I was a benchwarmer and a second stringer and had never played any position besides right field.

Anyway, that was about when I got shot.

Hot wet pain rushed into my right leg and I fell face first, barely even noticing the other kids and some teachers who were starting to shuffle out into the halls to see what the commotion was. Or the fact that a literal gunshot hadn’t set off any alarms, either in anyone’s head or actual. I was barely even paying attention to the guys coming for me, clopping closer and closer in their spotless boots.

“Ahhhhh! Oh god! Oh god! I’ve been shot!” I was writhing around on the floor like a dying bug, screaming bloody murder, which I thought was what had been inflicted on me. Some of the bystanders had their phones out. Assholes. Bozos. I haven’t been brave enough to check social media since. I just continued screaming and clutching my leg. “They got me! They really got me! Oh, the pain! The unbearable pain! It’s… it’s… Actually, wait. It doesn’t really hurt at all.”

I looked at my leg. There was a blob of red with something stuck to it. Some weird scrap of plastic. I peeled it off and read it. “Tomato Ketchup,” it said. I dabbed the red stuff and stuck my finger in my mouth. That settled it. I’d been shot alright. Shot with a ketchup packet.

It still kind of stung, a little.

“He’s down! Get him!” The guards or whatever were gaining on me. I didn’t have time to be sitting and wallowing in my own non-wound. I got up and ran. A few more ketchup packets whistled past, barely missing me and slapping wetly into the wall as I turned the corner.

I needed to go up, I realized. All I had over these guys was my speed and mobility. It wasn’t much and they probably would have already caught me if they weren’t having to haul their gear, but it was something. I was sure I could get away if I went up the stairs. They’d get slowed down or maybe even bottlenecked coming up after me.

I ran as fast as my ketchup-blasted legs would carry me. Did the school always have this many floors? I wondered as I flew up the stairs, swung by landing after landing, up and up. I’d never been up here before. I didn’t even have any idea where I was anymore and probably if I went down one of these halls instead of continuing up I would get lost, I thought.

Finally I was up as far as you could go. There was a little landing and a heavy door with one of those metal push bars to open it. I went through.

It was like stepping into another reality. All around me was green and shady, cool and airy like being under a big tree. The roof of the school must be some kind of garden, I surmised. I never even knew.

I looked around. It wasn’t just green. There were dots of red too. The deeper I delved into the secret garden the more it dawned on me what the red was.

Tomatoes.

I approached one, plucked it off its vine. It was ripe and red, round and juicy and dew dappled as well as firm, like biting into an apple, but the insides were gushy. I kept eating as I walked.

In the middle of this weird place was, like, some kind of greenhouse that looked a bit like a birdcage. Inside was this little old man in a tweed suit. He was watering the plants with a watering can and humming a tuneless song. I just stood there and watched, caught up in the sight. I guess he heard me sink my teeth into my snack cause he turned around. I recognized him. It was the principal.

His glasses were huge and made his eyes look like little black beads. “I see you’ve made it this far,” he said cryptically like some important NPC in an RPG or something, some kind of wizened old wizard maybe. “You must have faced many a trial and tribulation to wind up here.”

“You bet,” I was about to respond. But then I thought back. Not really, to be honest. I mean what just happened was pretty scary, even if those goons weren’t really firing anything close to live ammunition. Other than that all I had done was spell a word different a few times.

So instead I said something else completely. “I just need you to tell me one thing.”

“Go on.”

“Is it catsup? Or ketchup?”

Well, he didn’t get a chance to answer cause that was when the guards from before came bursting through the foliage, shoving aside vines and stomping tomatoes to mush underfoot.

“Finally!” their leader said. “You spry little— Oh! Sir.” He nodded to the principal, who nodded back.

“What are all you boys doing here?” the principal asked in his slow toothless old man voice. He was including me in that. He chuckled. “Is this some sort of party I haven’t been informed of?”

We all just stood there dumbfounded, not knowing what to say.

“Well, in any case,” he said, suddenly holding a glass bottle of something red, “can I offer anyone some catsup?”

I just blinked a few times, trying to process what I had just heard. Maybe the riot gear freaks were doing the same cause they just stood there with me not doing anything too.

Finally, I asked, “What did you just say?” It was what everyone had been asking me this whole time.

And like I had, the principal replied matter-of-factly, not understanding my confusion. “Catsup.” He offered me the bottle. I took it and examined the red condiment inside. “I make it myself, you know. Grow all the tomatoes right here on the roof and I even have a little kitchen over there” — he forked a gnarled thumb over his shoulder — “in the back where I keep all the other ingredients so I can whip up and bottle my own catsup myself.”

There he went. He was saying it again. The c-word. What the heck was happening here? How was this fair? How come he could say it but not me? I felt my anger rising.

I heard some pathetic sniffling and turned around. Some of the stupid guards were literally crying. “Th-that’s beautiful, sir! Such dedication!”

The principal laughed heartily from his pot belly. “All for the love of catsup, my boy! Ha ha ha ha ha!”

Well, I had about had it at that point. “What the hell?” I said to the riot goons. “He just said it! What the hell! What the hell is this! How come he can say it but when I do I get literally shot at! What the hell is going on here?!”

“Look, kid.” The leader guy lifted his visor to talk to me face to face. “We don’t make the rules. We just go to ludicrously drastic lengths to enforce them.”

It was at that moment that something inside me snapped. Maybe it was thanks to the frustration. Or maybe it was the sheer and undeniable fact that all of this had been started over nothing more than a stupid spelling inconsistency.

Whatever the case, I did something I never should have done. Still holding the bottle of homemade catsup, I ran all the way to the ledge of the roof.

“Nobody move! Nobody move a goddam muscle or the catsup gets it!” I dangled the bottle by its long smooth neck over the side of the roof, threatening to drop it. Had I… had I become the villain of this strange odyssey? More importantly, why did the school have literal roof access yet no protective fence or barrier? What the heck was up with that? Someone could fall from up here.

“I’m warning you! Stop saying the word! And bring that bottle back here right now! I’m not going to tell you again!” The riot squad tried to intimidate me and they were waving around their guns menacingly, but it seemed like they were complying, holding back for fear of my making good on my promise. They knew now that they were dealing with a madman willing to cross lines few have ever even dared tiptoe without a second thought. A man on the edge.

Literally.

“Oh SHI—”

It was all I got out of my mouth before I lost my balance completely. As I toppled backwards, fell from the roof, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was going to die. How many storeys up was I? The school was comically improbably unrealistically tall and I had climbed innumerable flights of stairs to get up here. There was no way in hell I’d survive this fall. Picking up speed, I saw my entire life flash before my eyes. Except it actually wasn’t my entire life.

It was just all the times I had eaten catsup.

Or ketchup. Whatever. Whatever, man. I don’t even know.

I closed my eyes and waited for the end.

But it didn’t come. Instead, I felt my body slap into something wet and sticky and tangy — no, sweet? — smelling, some slimy gunk. A second later I was sinking. I pawed and clawed and thrashed till I hit something solid and tried to pry myself out of the sticky mess. It was only then that I understood what had happened to me, realized where I was.

I had landed in a probably dumpster-sized vat of processed tomato product. Why it was here, precisely where I needed it to be at precisely the right moment to break my fall and deny the “death” part of my deathdrop, I still have no idea. All I know is one thing. As I pulled myself out, slid slimily over the edge of the massive container of condiment, the print on the side spelled out one word: “ketchup.”

It was catsup that got me into this mess.

And in the end, it was ketchup that saved me.

#

“Ughhhhh.” It was a few weeks later. I moaned performatively as I crash landed on the sofa at home. I was just out of the shower.

“Gross,” said my sister. She was standing there watching me while snacking on some t-rex jerky. She had given up being a vegetarian after only a couple of days. “At least don’t sprawl out like that. You’re gonna stink up the entire couch.”

“I can’t help it. I’m exhausted from all the scrubbing. Do you know how long it took for the last and only prior person to be dunked into a vat of ketchup like a human-sized and -shaped french fry to wash the smell out?”

Stupid question. Of course she did. I had been repeating the factoid literally every day since I became the second person to be dunked into a vat of ketchup like a human-sized and -shaped french fry. Sometimes multiple times a day. I’d been taking hour-long showers every day too, just trying to get the ketchup stench off me.

“Anyway,” I said, “what’s for dinner?”

“Mom’s cooking tonight.”

“Oh yeah? Is she making something with meat? Or are you back to being a vegetarian for another five seconds?” I didn’t really care. I just wanted to annoy her.

“Shut up, you weirdo. She’s making cat soup.”

“Cat sup?”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth I clamped a hand to my face to try and stuff them back in. But it was too late. The word had been said and couldn’t be unsaid. I looked at my sister and I bet I looked like some sad sorry animal.

She snickered. “Did you just accidentally leave the ‘o’ out of ‘cat soup’ and pronounce something really close to. Well. You know.”

I nodded weakly.

“Oh my god. You’d think you’d have learned not to misspell things by now. That’s incredible. You absolute dunderhead!”

“Language, young lady!” I heard my mom call from somewhere.

“D-did that count?” I stammered pleadingly. “Was that close enough to count as me saying it?”

She said she didn’t know and just laughed. If I went through the same misadventure again because I couldn’t stop saying the c-word even when I tried, she said, she’d never let me forget it for the rest of my life.

She wouldn’t have to worry about that, I said. I was gonna be extra careful from now on.

Well, a bunch of stuff happened after that and, long story short, I wasn’t actually as careful as I promised I was going to be. Most of the rest of the story is pretty similar to what happened the first day I fell head first into one of the biggest ever blobs of ketchup, so I’ll spare you the details. Suffice to say I ended up also performing the world’s third ever ketchup cannonball too — well, actually it was more like a bellyflop — and the smell still hasn’t worn off.