Blemished Soup with Garlic

The Garlic Man

What a strange year this has been so far, based on what I heard on television on days where I either eat my creamed soup with garlic or not.

Have you ever tried garlic soup? The only cost to this is the possibility of your breath reeking of flesh garlic cloves. My garlic soup in particular has been blemished with some pepper. So imagine creamy soup in a bowl, and on top were the sheds of pepper that wasn't too much but not too little as well. I call it the Blemished Soup with Garlic. Maybe I'll open up a restaurant and make that one of the signature soup dishes. Ah who am I kidding, garlic soup isn't for everyone.

But soup is soup, it's one of the warm foods you can eat on a cold afternoon like today, where it's raining. Of course this is Bogor, the City of Rain, and I've got enough garlic and soup to keep me warm during the cold days of rain. Such rain, keeping everybody inside (well almost everybody) and making everything clean, clearing out the dirt away. Today I am preparing myself to make a visit to an old friend of mine whom I befriended at Desa Jeruk, it's a small place located just before the roads that lead to Sentul. I've been in Bogor for a while, and it's this friend that's one of the reasons why I am here in this city. 

The friend was known as Armin, and unfortunately, he's isolated for a crime that involved him eating. No, he did not barge into a restaurant and did not pay. He took eating took a whole new level. People here call him the Bistro Cannibal, because of what he did in a small bistro in the month of April. The news said he devoured a couple, all the way to what's left of their flesh and bone. Oh dear as if what he did wasn't enough to shake up 2017. 

Armin and I somewhat go way back in school. We were classmates, but I rarely talked to him mainly because he would wander off by the time school was over. An odd person, he was once referred as, but personally I believed he was a harmless one. Of course this was long before his rise as a cannibal, for reasons I have yet to understand. Not only that, but apparently various reporters on the news were reported to get the scoop on Armin, about who were the people he knew, for the sake of a story to tell to everyone. His parents were out of the question. Mother had passed away, while the father, there's absolutely no clue. Armin was reported to say that his father left the family long ago. 

By the time I arrived to at the police station he was detained, it started to rain, and I pulled up my hoodie. Man at the front desk goes. "Anything I can help you with sir?"
I say. "I'm the Garlic Man."
His eyes widened. "Please go inside, quickly."

We were inside a small meeting room. Inside were a couple of officers, and in front of me was someone who was most likely their superior. It wasn't because of his moustache and age, but rather that glare and stance a higher being would give, and there was also his voice. 

"How outrageous that Bistro Cannibal is. It's been alarming the news since he did his thing and it's creating trouble for us. This isn't like handling a speeding ticket or something." The superior started. "As if the Poultry Boy case wasn't troubling enough, we just helped Jakarta Police to apprehend him, but now we still have this cannibal. Sir, we're more than grateful that you've lended us your time to be here, because that man has been asking for you. Pardon, he has been demanding for your presence."

"No problem at all officer." I said. "I decided to come as soon as I heard that it was mentioned in the news."

"Why does he call you that? The Garlic Man?"

I took out a grilled garlic clove from my small plastic bag, and asked if I could eat in here. The other officers seemed surprised and some had their eyes rolling. "The Garlic Man and the Bistro Cannibal." said one young officer. "That sounds like a movie already."

"Or a TV series." said the woman next to him. "Might be produced by Great Axe Productions."

"Jokes aside. We have more pressing matters." their superior said before turning to me. "The Bistro Cannibal-"