Dusk.

Double doors burst open with a great strength. A man plump, sweaty, aged, red in the face and wheezy stumbles into a darkened studio. He's clad in dirt-marked and food-stained white, not as a man of science or medicine but a pursuit exceedingly more noble in our age of fast food and fast money: a chef. His hat, so much like the Pope's in this darkened haze, bobbles to the front and the back, a sprung Jack-in-the-Box as he half-runs, teeters, feels with swollen blood-caked hands for anything to stop life and the horrible truths if has brought him from leaking at the seams. Knives cold after nights of neglect like these fall to the ceramic ground with a clatter as he searches, blind, for anything of consequence upon the unlit cooking surface often lit so flatteringly for the people of the Food network.

He looks to the stands as the blood threatens to runneth over from his lips, to the opposite end of this twisted ballpark. The seats, so red, velvet, and empty. A half gargle and he finds what he's been looking for. The drawer is pulled with so much of his remaining essence that they both fall: to the ground he slithers, on an oven dial does the back of his head bounce, and out rolls a dozen or so plump onions, cucumber, zucchini and tomatoes. He turns, his back against the great white desk bearing the infamous cooking surface surely rife with salmonella after the weeks of misuse, banging his head behind it and sputtering as he goes, as if behind cover in a war. His hat goes limp and doubles over as he angles his head downwards with great effort, cheeks plump with saliva and blood and skin. His eyes settle on one of the tomatoes in the group of vegetables and he makes a noise, his first, like he has discovered a solution to some universal puzzle or coolant to his heat, or perhaps to call it to him. His fat fingers shake, rattle, and grasp it: a tomato, no longer green, firm, plump and curved in a way that resembles shaved pumpkins.

He smiles, his first, causing what juices he holds in his mouth to squirt from the sides so he stops himself, and looks up like a child, eyes gleaming. He lifts the tomato with him, manages to bring his torso up to the counter and keep it there, elbows jerking against atrophied muscles in his upper arms.

A spotlight cracks open and he squints at it, smiling once more, visibly red and tired and with tubes jutting from the neck as he strains to keep his mouth closed. But no longer. Like a sick Halloween gag he blurts forward, so much he almost loses his chest's grip on the counter and his upraised hand's on the tomato, raising it to the light like a great prize. But he remains, and in a moment his eyes turn inward, eyebrows caked with sweaty dirt force downwards and he lets open his mouth with great defiance to his condition. Liquid pours down his chin and neck and smock and white and clothes and skin and stays there, dripping, being absorbed. Eyes bruised, twisted, stirring in madness open and do not back down against the halogen light. In unison he cries past a mouth bearing only stumps and gums:

"TOMATURU--!"

He crushes the tomato in the miserable claw that hoists it and falls to the ground in the instant the pulpy mess pervades his cracked fingernails. Thumping against the marble of the counter like a ragdoll, he gurgles once more having lost control of his body. The other vegetables lay undisturbed.

The spotlight ends, hums and leaves them in silence.

Somewhere, an Iron Chef cackles, mouth full of cold green pepper.