I must have been 9 years old when this thing happened. I used to live with my mother, stepfather and three cats in a house in a poor suburb. My dad left when I was only a toddler after an abusive co-dependent narc relationship. My mother found another guy when I was 7 and he moved in with us. Enter the stepfather. It is safe to say that it's often difficult.

One day he had left a jar of asparagus open on the kitchen bench. My stepfather was cooking, unfortunately. His cooking skills were not even half of my mum's. Anyway, he left the kitchen for a while to do something else; in that instance he had briefly abandoned his cooking project including this jar of asparagus on water that was still in open condition on the kitchen bench and ready for deployment. At this point I was playing somewhere in the living. I can't recall where my mother was.

When my stepfather returned from his other duty and entered the kitchen again, shit hit the fan: the asparagi had disappeared! The jar was empty. Obviously, clearly, without any doubt, the perpetrator of this heinous crime could have been no other than me. Naturally, my mother was innocent. And I, the naughty child had, without hesitation, snatched this golden opportunity to swallow down a dozen elongated soggy vegetables at the cost of his next gastronomic wonder. He accused me of theft. He was very angry. He stayed very angry. My mother shut her mouth. And in my defence I said, “The cat ate them.”

Fast forward two months — we have the next stepfather dinner with a jar of asparagus. Apparently these vegetables cook quickly because yet again they were in open condition on the kitchen bench ready to be deployed. As the rest of the food was simmering on the stoves, he sat down at the table with me and my mom, overlooking the kitchen. He had barely uttered a word to my mother when Alfred, my black and white cat, jumped on the kitchen bench, approaching the open jar. With a swift single nail technique he hooked into an asparagus and swallowed it whole. Both adults perplexed at this phenomenon as if they were immersed in a David Attenborough's nature documentary. Before scooping out the next unit, Alfred was shooed away from the jar.

Seeing the embarrassment on my stepfather's face was quite enjoyable. But I don't think I ever received an apology. Nor did he ever learn his lesson, as these incidents would continue to occur until I left the house at 18.