Gona' bake a pie, gona' bake a pie

We had apple pie for desert again today. My Dad makes terrible apple pies, and he makes them with unpleasant frequency. You walk into the kitchen and you just know - the warm, stale smell wafting, the green and brown apple skins piled up in the compost bin, the awful mess itself waiting in the shadows at the back of the low oven, growing crustier and crustier. It's become his stock-desert, turning up on the counter whenever a certain number of days has passed, or, you know, whenever he's just at a loose end for twenty minutes.

C and I talk about it in hushed whispers - we don't want him to know the truth. What can we do about it anyway? Coming right out and saying it would only make Dad go off into a sulk, probably baking several self-pity pies to make himself feel better. Sometimes one of us will remark, offhandedly, on how sweet and delicious the ones Granny makes are: 'One of these days we should really squeeze the recipe out of her', we chuckle desperately, pleadingly. But to no avail.

The leftovers are set to rest in the fridge, rotting gleefully. No one eats it except for S, who doesn't actually eat it, just puts it in her lunch box and throws it out when she comes home from school. When it's all gone the cycle begins again, like groundhog day. And we sit there, chewing away on the pastry dust and bitter, dry apple-goo, not saying a word to save his feelings... 'mnamnam, delicious, mnamnam'...

Oh how I would love to take a hammer to one of those pies.