Chicken Bone

By Nkulu Kikudji

The restaurant industry is one of the most stressful in the world. It is a place where many people need to be high or drunk to deal with the stress.

In this short story CHICKEN BONE, was one of the author’s co-workers in the frenetic restaurant business. He was one those alcoholics who never passed on an opportunity to feed his vice, even if his job was on the line. He came up with lies to save his job, yet one of his lies caught up with him in a very twisted way. His short life, like his stature, became the most hilarious story on everyone’s lips at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, South Africa.

“You tell the story of Chicken Bone very well with a humorous and racy style. It was a fun read. You also treat your characters with compassion. All of this makes the book a very good read and I thoroughly enjoyed it.”

-Editor’s comment

Nkulu KikudjiI was born on September 05, 1978 in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

In 1999 the country went through a rough political war that caused most young people to flee, to find refuge in other countries in the world. Nkulu’s mother decided to take a chance with him and send him to South Africa. The plan was for Nkulu to continue with his engineering studies that he had abandoned in his second year at the University of Lubumbashi in the DRC. Things did not work out as planned. Ill health and life circumstances forced him to stick to working as a waiter in restaurants ever since.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nkulu Kikudji
• Release date: Jul 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463584491

Book preview

Chicken

Bone

Nkulu Kikudji

Copyright © 2019 Nkulu Kikudji

Published by Nkulu Kikudji Publishing at Smashwords

First edition 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system without permission from the copyright holder.

The Author has made every effort to trace and acknowledge sources/resources/individuals. In the event that any images/information have been incorrectly attributed or credited, the Author will be pleased to rectify these omissions at the earliest opportunity.

Published by Nkulu Kikudji using Reach Publishers’ services,

Edited by Susan Hall for Reach Publishers

Cover designed by Reach Publishers

P O Box 1384, Wandsbeck, South Africa, 3631

Website: www.reachpublishers.co.za

E-mail: [e-mail]

Table of Contents

Shorty

Breakfast Time

The Function

Chicken Bone

The End of Chicken Bone

Shorty

Shorty was his name – that is the name we all knew him by. He was short, dark and noisy. He spoke too much and had a deep voice. If you heard his voice without seeing him, you would think he was a giant. He had a small round face with big eyes that were always bloodshot red. God had denied him facial hair: on his head one could see mouse dropping-like little bunches of hair. He had a bit of a moustache that he spent most of his day brushing and a few black strings hanging from his chin. He had a habit of pulling out the latter, one by one, when he got bored. He was in his 20s but he looked way older. He could easily have been mistaken for a 40-year-old.

My name is Yves and I met him when I was working as a waiter in a restaurant at the Waterfront in Cape Town. He was a chef or, should I say, he used to think of himself as a chef but actually he was just a guy who was hired to wash dishes.

The kitchen usually had one main chef and two assistants plus one person to fry chips, cut onions and prepare sauces. They made up the hot kitchen. The kitchen also had a cold section which was made up of four chef’s assistants. The last section was the scullery, which had four cleaners. The chips fryer, as we usually called him, was Sexy-eyes: he had big lazy eyes and was always smiling. The reason for this was that he could not speak a word of the English language. His response to anything that we asked him was