Essential table manners – flash fiction

I don’t tend to plan flash fictions. They just turn up…

One begins by delicately eating the garnish of the first course. For the second course, one will find a small and amusing dip to the left of the plate. That dip is specifically for your garnish. The third course does not feature a garnish – that would be vulgar. No one who is anyone eats the garnish that accompanies the fourth course. It is traditional to leave a longer gap between courses four and five than at other points in the meal, to facilitate the quiet removal of the ill-bred. Those who have not been taught the finer points of etiquette, poisoned by their own pretensions. The fifth course invariably has a celebratory tone to it, and from here it can be said that the evening truly begins.