“And the Jalapeño Took One for the Team (Instead of the Cucumber)”
The Origin Story of The Kitchen Chronicles
The Kitchen Chronicles: Jalapeño #1
©ESR 2025

Prelude 1: Of Fried Eggs and Yoga Pants
Prelude 2: The Trash Bag Operative

Scorched Earth, Scorched… Everything

⸻

There was once a woman.

A sad, sultry, spiraling woman

whose kitchen knew more secrets

than any diary ever dared record.

She was the kind of woman

who drank her whiskey neat,

her tears salty,

and her regrets garnished with ice.

That night?

That fateful, over-lubricated, under-inhibited,

poorly-lit night—

she went to the fridge looking for comfort.

Emotional. Physical.

…Botanical.

There it was.

The Cucumber.

Long. Cool. Reliable.

It practically winked at her from the crisper drawer.

But alas.

In her whiskey-soaked haze, she reached wrong.

Not right.

And fate, cruel temptress that she is,

put destiny and destruction on the same shelf.

A jalapeño.

Dark. Curved.

Dangerously firm.

A red devil with a mission.

The whiskey made her colorblind.

She didn’t know.

Not until it was too late.

There was no “safe word.”

Only the immediate REVELATION

that this was no cucumber.

There was fire.

There was crying.

There was the kitchen tile becoming

intimate with her knees.

There were Google searches that would later haunt her algorithms.

Even the cat refused to look at her directly for three days.

⸻

The next morning…

She sat in the bath, cold water running,

a bag of frozen peas between her thighs

like a peace offering to her own body.

The jalapeño?

Lying on the counter.

Cut in half.

Still smug.

She muttered, broken but wiser:

“Well… at least I know I’m alive.”

And somewhere in the distance,

Benny the Cat softly purred,

“That’s one spicy meatball.”