Salt & Pepper — Part 1

“Hey, Pepper, get up! Why are you lazing around again?” Salt bellowed at her inseparable friend.

But Pepper just yawned and rolled over, hoping Salt would give him a few more minutes of peace. As always, he was wrong.

“Listen, what was it that smelled so good at dinner last night?” she asked, poking him in the side.

At once, memories of the evening meal flashed through Pepper’s mind. Pepper and Salt lived on the kitchen table in an old apartment in the city that belonged to the Horák family. The walls had recently been given a new coat of paint — Pepper and Salt liked their fresh surroundings in this dining room overlooking the street.

By the way, the street is usually quite busy, because the railway station is situated just opposite their building. All day long, at regular intervals, a crowd emerges from the station. Everyone is keen to catch a bus or a taxi after arriving by train. Chaos, commotion, tooting cars — that’s what these two friends observe happening day-in and day-out. But their focus changes when the Horáks sit down at the table for their evening meal — then, entirely different sorts of sounds take over. Mrs Horák considers dinnertime to be a kind of family cement — she insists that everyone dines together.

It has become more or less a tradition that on Fridays the Horáks take a break from cooking. By the time everyone gets home from work, school, training, etcetera, no one really feels like cooking. And it’s the end of the week! So they treat themselves to something special — usually the kind of food they cannot easily prepare themselves. They order a meal online, choosing from a wide variety of cuisines. A whole world of…