Charlie the Onion

Sometimes there was a problem with souls in the household.

Mr. Bear and the dolly bought a white onion and left it sitting on a shelf for too long. It was intended for dinner one night. It was intended for a stir fry. But they forgot it, ignored it too long.

Her Katness noticed it one day. It had started to sprout, a bright little tuft on top of the bulbous, scaly body of the thing. She cocked her head.

She found a green marker and drew a face on the onion, so that its sprout looked like a little tuft of hair. Just an upright line for each eye with an arc over it to denote a lid, and a mouth. Its mouth was a mostly straight line, drifting downward just a degree or two on the left side, again with a small arc on each end, this time to suggest laugh lines. The onion now looked concerned.

Her Katness didn’t say anything about the onion, but later Mr. Bear walked into the kitchen – it was a bright, sunny afternoon, and the kitchen was flooded with mid-day light in a way that only a kitchen, the heart of a home, can be flooded with mid-day light. He noticed the onion and laughed. He understood that he was being made fun of, and that was okay.

“What’s his name?” he asked Kat, who was probably in the living room, studying.

“What’s whose name?” she replied, having forgotten about the onion by then.

“The onion.”

“Charlie,” she replied instantly.

That was a thing about Her Katness, and also a thing about souls. If she had hesitated before telling Bear the onion’s name, it might have left one to wonder – left us to wonder – if she had just been inventing a name for the onion, searching through the recesses of her tumultuous mind for a suitable one. But she didn’t hesitate – Kat rarely did. By some mysterious process – almost certainly the same process by which she extemporized clever songs about daily activities at unexpected moments, and almost certainly the same process by which she supplied wrong answers that made sense to her to serious questions with a conviction that bought them acceptance – she just answered questions like that.

Which made it seem not like she had just named the onion Charlie, but like the onion’s name actually WAS Charlie and she was just passing the information along when asked.

Which goes back to the thing about souls, and the reason why Her Katness probably enacted more accidental ensoulments than other members of the household. If you NAMED a thing, it wasn’t nearly so likely to manifest a soul. But if you were trying to think of a name for a thing and its actual name occurred to you, well, then, you better hope that that was a thing that you wanted to treat with the same considerations as your fellow humans, because only things with souls, or things likely to develop souls, or things in the throes of ensoulment, were likely to have their own names that you realize as oppose to bestow.

And so Charlie the Onion had a name. It didn’t seem like a problem at first. Lots of soulless things around the household had names, names that had been bestowed and not realized.

But no one bothered to throw Charlie away, even after he had clearly been around too long to be used for stir fry, and so he sat on his shelf, continuing to sprout. And every so often, Mr. Bear or Her Katness or the dolly would notice Charlie’s continuing endeavor, and say, “Hey, look at Charlie.” Eventually he developed multiple shoots that grew so long that they started to flop over to one side of his green markered face, which increased the suggestion of hair. Actually, he started to look a little punk rock.

On a Tuesday, the dolly came home to find Charlie sitting on top of a box by the back door. Mr. Bear was moping around.

“I tried to throw Charlie away and I couldn’t,” he told the dolly. “I’ve gotten too attached to him; I think we accidentally gave him a soul. Do you think we could plant him in the back yard?” He looked very worried, not unlike Charlie himself.

The dolly was charmed. “I think we probably can,” she reassured him. They went to find Her Katness, who handled most of the gardening around the house.

“Don’t worry,” said Kat. “I can definitely take care of him.” And she had the dolly fill a vase with water, and she found some toothpicks and poked four of them into Charlie’s head at the compass points. The dolly winced as she watched.

“It’s for his own good, dolly,” Kat said firmly. That was why Kat was a good nurse. Other people can’t bring themselves to stick toothpicks into someone’s head just because it is for his own good, but nurses can.

“Besides,” added Kat as an afterthought, “now he’s even more punk rock.”

And so Charlie sat in the windowsill for a while, suspended at the top of the vase by his toothpicks, his stubby neck in the water where it could start to send down roots. Once he had some roots, Her Katness took him out into the garden in the backyard and planted him, and he became a part of the family.

October 2008