The Onion and The Egg

In the chip shop near where you live was an onion and an egg. The onion lived in a pickling jar on the back shelf with its brothers and sisters and the egg did likewise in a jar adjacent to the onions’. The egg and the onion would talk about many things but one thing they loved to talk about was language. Sometimes they would talk about language in a different language often in a language they did not understand. The vocabulary of the Europeans was too easy for them, as were the languages of the Asians, Africans and even the dictionary of the Eskimos were a piece of deep fried lettuce to them. What the onion and the egg were interested in were languages that nobody was aware of, languages that nobody had spoken yet. One afternoon both the egg and the onion were having a chit chat in Spanish which they learnt by holding their breath for twelve years and weeping. “You know onion,” Said the egg, “I would very much like to see the countries where these languages are spoken. What say you we go out on our travels using the polystyrene chip dish for a boat?”
“That sounds like a very good idea my dear egg. Let us travel far and wide. To lands where no elephant has trod.” Agreed the onion.

So after bidding their pickled brethren and sistren a fond farewell the two chums unscrewed the tops of their jars by a pathetic force and leapt to the counter as to begin their sojourn to undiscovered lands a plenty. They accumulated the oblong polystyrene dish that was usually employed for accommodating chips. For a paddle they used a tiny wooden fork and for fuel they used fish batter. And out through the locked door they went. The egg and the onion were in love but they would not admit it to themselves. Not for them the seas of blue, they were not heading for countries like Prussia, Persia or Bognor Regis instead they would set sail where the sea was made of ink and instead of being salty would be sugary. The onion and the egg arrived at the harbour of the inky sugary sea where a crowd of twenty two and a tenth Queen Victorias who were not quite dead yet were waiting to give them a send off with fireworks and flapjacks. Unfortunately the monarchs got the two mixed up and there was a custardy smell to the Catherine wheels, jumping jacks, bottle rockets and traffic lights as they burst into luminous life. But no matter for as soon as the Queen Victorias who were not quite dead yet exclaimed, “Clear orf!” that the onion and the egg were on the inky sugary sea in their chip-dish boat rowing with a tiny wooden fork and the outboard motor powered by batter nominally used for crisping the cod, the haddock, the Mars bar and the camomile chicken soup. Eight hours it took for them to sail before they found anything worth while. They passed some continents, islands and peninsulas but they were all smothered in rice.

The egg felt seasick and begged with the onion to moor pretty soon. “O please, O onion let us explore that land over there. My belly feels nauseous with all this tossing and turning in the superink waves. Plus we’ve ran out of liquorice and Scottish sugarelly water. If we do not explore I will fall ill and we will starve.” The onion chastised the egg by reminding of the reason of their venture. “We travel not by eye but by ear. To discover languages that have not been spoken yet. Nations that have seven hundred words for ‘the’ and who divide verbs into categories of cinnamon.” Being told that the egg got better and was never seasick again.

A land was eventually found covered in spikes round the edges. The onion and the egg were both in a quandary. The egg being previously pickled and therefore without any shell would hurt its soft self on the spikes that surrounded their newly found land. But they had a piece of good fortune when the onion spotted a muffled horatio who had collections of copper kettles and bungee rope. “O muffled horatio,” Requested the onion, “If you be so kind as to lower one of your copper kettles with one of your bungee ropes so as we may explore your land?” But to the ears of the muffled horatio the language of the onion sounded twice as alien as Martian and Venusian would to us. Going by the rhythmic patterns of the onion’s speech he wrongly deduced that the words being spoken were obscene. Greatly offended the muffled horatio threw the island’s accumulation of McCrocodiles (a Scottish derivation of the alley-gator) at the perplexed pickled pals. One McCrocodile went down with mouth agape swallowing the onion and egg whole.

Deep inside the McCrocodile that had artificially evolved into a garden were sponge cakes and cider, samosas and milkshakes. The onion yelped, “Gadzooks my dear egg we have enough food in this McCrocodile to last us until the final Shrove Tuesday.” But the egg lamented, “Where can we find friends in this beast’s leathery stomach?” And with that both the egg and the onion fell into a comical depression. Unaware that the McCrocodile had used its roller-skated legs to climb back up the spikes along with its great aunts and great uncles in law. For the McCrocodiles being reptilian also had their wants and needs. What they wanted was to go to the great Cava River where the red and white traffic cones grazed. What they needed was for their rotten teeth to be cleaned by the knitting needle beaked Skinny Malinki birds.

So you can probably guess being clever and that with degrees and doctorates as long as your trunk that as the onion and the egg wept arm in arm they suddenly saw the McCrocodile’s long mouth open to see a Skinny Malinki poke in. “O help us!” They cried and amazingly the Skinny Malinki understood. She fished them both out and gave them a clout squawking, “I bet you didn’t think you’d end up here.”
“Tell us,” Enquired the onion, baffled by the whole thing, “How come you and us are able to converse yet our languages are strange and often obscene?”
The Skinny Malinki expleted, “You popacapapetals! Aren’t you aware of the paper and comb that can be found in the microscopic cactus? That spiky plant which is taller than Earth and fatter than Marti Caine contains at least eight paper and combs.”
“That’s it!” Eurekaed the onion. “I read about it in The Evian Book of Failures, A paper and comb is far more ideal than employing a Russian translator.” So the Skinny Malinki became their guide with the onion and the egg side by side. Both became clever speaking new words, new alphabets and when they were as clever as a hippopotamus both the onion and the egg realised they loved one another. “O my dear sweet egg. Let us get married. Let us travel farther and collect guests from all the lands we visit and invite them back to the chippy where we embarked. Our wedding will be an intimate affair and the Skinny Malinki bird can be our parson providing he converts to Pianissimo.”

The egg was overjoyed to hear the onion speak so romantically. And so everything went swimmingly. The onion and the egg collected guests from all the lands that geographically emerged from the sugar ink seas and brought them back to the chip shop near to where you live. It was a glorious wedding where the Flumjets who spoke Graldiddle, the Watersizzles who spoke a Celtic Chocolate and the Versimutoads who whistled in calculated Ontoni Tinny were the guests of honour along with forty five million other people speaking tongues foreign to one another. The Skinny Malinki bird acted as the parson and was already into Pianissimo when required. And diving into the boiling oil were the onion and the egg who were neither bride or groom.

© 2009 Clinton Morgan