Arnon Grunberg

Letters

Chicken

When I was 18 I fell in love with a waitress at an Italian restaurant in Amsterdam. For a couple of years I didn’t dare to go back to this restaurant, because I had written this waitress approximately 100 letters, several of them were sent to her by registered mail. After all, you never know.
But the last couple of years I frequent this restaurant again. Last Sunday I went there for dinner with a friend and I ordered a specialty of the day, fettucini with pulpo. Not only did the octopus in my pasta look like chicken, the octopus tasted like chicken.
I was too embarrassed to ask the waitress: “Is it possible that your octopus is a chicken?” I decided that this was a genetically modified octopus that looked like a chicken, tasted like a chicken and that nevertheless had been able to swim in the sea.

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