akt 5, scene 5

I had half an onion in the refrigerator, and I felt the beans needed about a half-onion-worth of diced, translucent, savory, sulfuric bulb, so I unwrapped it and chopped it. But it was the root-end half, the remainder resulting from the onion having been split along its equator rather than pole to pole, top to bottom (the way as I habitually halve onions after trimming both roots and the base of the leaves), and so I ended up chopping it in a new way, looking with interest after each slice to see if any contours emerged that were new or unfamiliar in any way.

Part of what is so pleasing about onions when one is cooking and wielding the long vegetable knife oneself is that they are already sliced in one direction. That direction is concentric, but no matter. Dicing an onion still requires maybe a third fewer cuts than dicing almost anything else. If you have diced a lot of onions, you know this, and I have.

But I had not (or not often, or not recently) made these particular cuts through an onion, sliced it just this way. The internal geometry of an onion is complex and layered, and I thought it might reveal itself in a new way, perhaps a dramatically new way, sliced in this unfamiliar manner. I watched carefully. I did not notice anything very remarkable, but it is possible that I missed it.