We shall confine our statements here to the subjects of Taco Sauce and Torture, venturing not at all upon digressions concerning Miss Powell and the curious sounds emanating from her rooms after dusk nor to the disturbing expanses of fresh-turned earth appearing in her garden each morn.
Her comings and goings are her own, as are those of the vagabonds and wastrels we observe no more in her area of the city.
That taco sauce has been used as a form of torture is no revelation to those with an eye for Tex-Mex cuisine and counter-terrorism. Indeed, among the farmboys of Langley and the halls of MI5 the weekly “Chi-Chi’s Night” is earplugs and rain ponchos mandatory.
That said, the earliest documented use of taco sauce as a form of torture took place during the Spanish Inquisition at the castle of a noblewoman, named only as “The Scorned Woman of Seville.” While her true name was purged from all manuscripts of the time by exorcists, some portraits have survived.
(Their resemblance to any contemporary persons must be regarded as coincidence and nothing more.)
In the Vatican’s Encyclopedia Infernum, we read “The sorrowful knave wept for death e’en should it bring interment in unhallowed ground, proclaiming loudly the fires of Hell should seem a lover’s caress upon the ministrations of The Woman… Said She in all innocence ‘My swain, that was but the extra-mild…’”
Further pages of this volume appeared torn out, but were rumored to have been repurposed among early medical colleges as chemistry and anatomy guides. Still others were discovered in the possession of certain collectors after the fall of the Reich.
And so we see (if we can bear to look) a continuum of atrocity flowing from the depravity of the middle ages up through the convenience of the modern drive-thru with its optional packets of “sensory enhancement.”
Whether they are employed to warm the palate or inflame the places where love once dwelled is, as it ever was, between us and God.
