“What’s for dinner?”

5:47pm Tuesday.

Three children in the living room, and the question… the eternal question echoes through the home:

“What’s for dinner?”

He stands at the counter, staring at the freezer burn that decorates his chicken nuggets like frosting. He has been here before.

He will be here again.

—————

His crime was simple and as ancient as the gods.

It was simply “love.”

He had loved cooking once.

Truly loved it. The alchemy of it— taking raw, unrefined ingredients and, through a little knife work, patience, and some inherent understanding of their interplay… he created.

He’d hosted dinner parties where guests leaned back in their chairs, stunned into silence by his coq au vin. He made his own stock. His own pasta. He brought homemade focaccia to potlucks and told people, casually, that he didn’t really use recipes anymore. Just felt it out, you know?

“I’d say I’m actually better than most,” he’d said once, at a barbecue as he watched a neighbor struggle with bland, store bought burger patties.

The gods heard his hubris…

And they smirked.

———————

Then he had kids.

At first, he had ideals. Farm to table plans and thoughts of watching them grow up with refined palates.

Thought his skill would translate as he shaped pancakes into works of art, bento boxes with little faces made of vegetables, pasta from scratch tossed in butter and fresh parmesan.

His daughter, age four, had looked at the handmade ravioli and said: “I don’t like the bumpy parts.”

And the gods began to smile.

—————

5:47pm Wednesday

Plate down: Lasagna. Three hours of work. Layers of bechamel he had teased into silk with loving patience.

“We had this last week.” His oldest said.

“We had it three months ago.” He countered.

“I don’t care, I don’t like it.” His middle son said, pushing the carefully plated square away.

His daughter came in with the coups de grâce… “Mom makes it better.”

His wife has never made lasagna.

5:47pm Thursday

Plate down: Pot roast. The kind his grandmother made. Fall-apart tender. Root vegetables caramelized in beef fat.

“What are these orange things?”

“Carrots…?”

“I don’t like carrots.”

“You ate carrots yesterday.”

“Those were different carrots.”

5:47pm Friday

Plate down: The chicken casserole his mother made. Chicken browned first, fond deglazed with a crisp white wine, vegetables softened, everything bound in a sauce he built from scratch. Three pans, forty minutes of active work. Delicious? An understatement.

“There’s stuff mixed in.”

“Is that… celery? I don’t eat celery.”

“Can you pick out the chicken pieces?”

He picks out the chicken pieces. He is magician with a whisk…. and he picks out chicken pieces with a fork while his soul dissolves.

5:47pm Saturday

There is no plate. Not yet. He has asks them what they want. Oh folly of follies. A chorus of contradictions assaults him from the living room:

“I don’t know.”

“Surprise us!”

“Not chicken.”

“Not pasta.”

“Nothing with sauce.”

“Can we have what Aiden’s family is having?”

Aiden’s family is having pizza. Delivered. His parents are wise.

Plate down: Pizza. He orders pizza.

“This isn’t the good place.”

“Can I have it without cheese?”

“PIZZA WITHOUT CHEESE IS BREAD.”

“You don’t have to yell….”

5:47pm……

The realization comes on a Wednesday.

Or a Thursday?

Or a Tuesday?

Time has lost meaning. There is only before dinner and after dinner, and the brief silence in between before the cycle begins again.

The voices rise from the living room like a chant. Like curses. Like the eternal wheel of fate itself turning inexorably, grinding him to a pulp:

“What’s for dinner?”

He opens the freezer. Frozen chicken breasts stare back at him. He has prepared them every possible way. Baked, fried, grilled, poached, shredded, cubed, sliced thin, left whole.

He has brined them, marinated them, dry-rubbed them, trusted them to the mercy of a crockpot’s warm embrace.

No preparation imaginable satisfied.

He takes them out anyway.

This is the hill. This has always been the hill. The question is the climb, the dinner is the summit, and the complaints— the endless, creative, contradictory complaints— are the boulder rolling back to crush him.

Every.

Day.

5:47pm tomorrow, it will begin again. And tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow evermore.

———————

Greece 800 BCE

Aristos squints at the scroll, holding it closer to the window light, then further away, as if distance will clarify the answer to a riddle held within the paper. He holds it sideways before shrugging and turning to his coworker Kleitos.

“Can you make this word out?” He points to a smudged and water damaged symbol.

Kleitos doesn’t look up from his vase. He’s painting the figure of a man, bent in eternal labor. “Just tell me what the scroll says. I’m almost done with this part.”

“I can’t! Look at this. Is that an iota?”

“Could be.”

“Or… wait.” Aristos tilts the scroll. “I think it’s an epsilon. No?”

“Use context, what does the rest say?”

“That he pushes… bread… up a hill. Every day. For eternity.”

Kleitos pauses mid-brushstroke. “Bread?”

“That’s what it says! Pitta!”

Kleitos stands and grabs the scroll from Aristos. “That makes no sense.”

“I know!!”

Kleitos squints at the scroll one more time before shrugging and handing it back to Aristos. “It has to be ‘rock’… Petra… Obviously.” He returns to his vase, “rock makes a better story anyway.”

Aristos considers the smudged text and the choice before him.

He takes a quill out and writes petra.

The scroll will be copied. The vase will be copied. The copies will be copied. A boulder will be painted on a thousand vases, carved into a thousand stones, taught to a thousand children.

And somewhere, somewhen, 5:47 PM on a Tuesday, Sisyphus will stand at a kitchen counter and hear the question that unmakes men.

The real punishment…

“What’s for dinner?”