QVC
by SJ Townend
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
Should you?
Should you go ahead and order the air fryer?
Everyone at work has one, and the shopping channel is offering a discount you can’t refuse. The woman on the screen with a perma-rictus grin and max-coverage foundation that looks better on her than it does on you nods too much. Far too much. But as she babbles away and nods and grins and nods and babbles and gesticulates, her persuasive diatribe convinces you, at least, to put down your milk-laced spoon and crank the volume up.
The camera zooms in until you can see the craftwork of today’s presenter’s Turkey teeth. She nods faster, smiles wider. She ogles the electrical contraption, which is perched on an elegant velvet tablecloth, pulls out the little drawers of the Fry-O-Matic 3000, and pushes them back in. The camera zooms in on her cleavage. The camera backs out, provides a panoramic view of the whole studio, and then moves in again on the machine. From where you’re sitting, it looks as if the host’s breasts might pop out from her blouse, or her bejeweled fingers, which caress the culinary device like a mother caresses a newborn, might soon project like cubic zirconia-encrusted branches from your screen.
You like this channel. There’s an unquantifiable safety in this show. It’s the only thing on that doesn’t remind you of when uninvited things jumped out from the screen. Today, this evening, it’s just her hands, just her hands stretching out to greet you, just her well-manicured talons and the promise of air-fried food reaching out to haul you in. You hope.
She stops talking. Draws a deep breath. Places her hand on her hip and looks directly into the camera. Earnest. Heartfelt, even. You’re ninety percent convinced. Then, she says — her words surely directed at you, for you — that having an air fryer changed everything for her.
Fast.
Clean.
Efficient.
Crispy without the guilt.
Bull’s eye. Sold.
It’ll slice ten minutes off your weeknight dinner routine. Make vegetables fun again. It’s modern, sleek, and best of all, it’s the kind Tina, your team lead at work, has, the very same one you overheard her recommending in the canteen to Marjorie from accounts between demure bites of embrittled buffalo cauliflower.
So you go for it and make the call and purchase the shiny air fryer.
It arrives in a box with embossed glossy lettering that, as you close your eyes and run the pad of your index finger over the words, calms the racing horses in your mind. Like it’s a sacrament, you unbox the fryer. Stainless steel and black matte plastic. A pristine thing of unrivalled, unmeddled beauty. In hindsight, you don’t remember ordering it, not the exact moment, anyway. You must’ve made the call or clicked the link in a moment of pervasive liminality. One of those little blanks you keep finding more of lately, like the skin-thin cracks that spider down from your kitchen ceiling light.
After peeling the protective stickers off from your new device, with the reverence of a monk, you place it next to the microwave and plug it in. It beeps with assertion, like it’s happy. Like it wants to get to know you.
The first thing you make is chips. Not the frozen kind but the sort with real potatoes. Earlier, while waiting for the delivery, you watched seven YouTube videos on how to air-fry like a pro, and you refer to the handwritten notes you took to ensure you follow each step correctly. Whispering affirmations while it hums and clicks, you imagine the discussion you’ll try to initiate tomorrow with your coworkers. They’ll nod and understand and make eye contact with you as you relay your success. Brilliant, they’ll think, as, open-armed, they welcome you into the inner circle. And they’ll listen with bated breath to your story of how you optimized the process, brilliant, another recruit. Someone else who gets it.
The fries are crisp. You Instagram them and tag a few colleagues, but not in a flashy way. Nothing ostentatious. Too much pomp and circumstance will look like you’re trying too hard. The caption is humble: “Trying the air fryer life. Not bad!” You omit that it’s your only hot meal in days, that you’ve been eating Frosties for dinner because the supermarket with its aggression of obelisk newspaper stands right at the front feels like an impenetrable minefield.
The same headline will still be lurking on the front of the local rag, you’re sure of it, dead certain. And probably a few of the national tabloids, too. You first saw it three months ago — that version of your surname. Wrong, but still recognisable. They hadn’t spelled it right, but they hadn’t had to because the photos made everything visible.
Beep and it’s done and you open the tray and you slop the large portion out. You stare at your creation. Then you examine the empty fryer tray to ensure you have cleared it entirely out. A single speck of burnt potato on the tray remains. You pick at it and pick at it until it comes free, and your throat tightens in that old way. The same way it used to when your son would lock his bedroom door from the inside, would remain in his room for days. You take one mouthful and scrunch up your nose and tip the rest into the bin.
You bring leftover “Harissa Sausage and Vegetable Tray Bake” to work and pretend they’re just scraps from the night before, like you cooked with ease, like there wasn’t a thirty minute hunt for a ruler to ensure you sliced the chipolatas to exactly the correct dimension followed by two hours of obsessive Googling about how to wash the basket correctly before twenty minutes spent arranging the cubed carrots on the parchment paper equidistant from the onion “just in case.”
Sitting with your Tupperware container at the end of the canteen table, the Others laugh and talk about how theirs does salmon, brussels sprouts, and desserts. You try to enjoy your own concoction and nod along and laugh at all the appropriate moments like you’ve tried all their recipes before, not that anyone notices. You haven’t yet. But you will. You will.
You start air frying everything and documenting your failures and successes in a brand new leatherbound notepad. You give cutesy names to presets and, after each use, clean the drawer with a toothbrush. You time it just right so your dinner is ready the moment the evening news starts, the same time you switch over to QVC. If only everything else clicked into place like this machine. It’s the only thing in your life that makes a sympathetic sound when it’s done and doesn’t ask probing questions.
Each night that follows, on your return home from work, you fry and you fry and you fry. It’s become part of your routine, this dedication to try to make the smell of oil-free crispness erase the other smell. The faint one in your son’s room. Upstairs, at the back of the house where he used to isolate himself to surf the net and sleep, you scrubbed the carpet, the walls, even the vents with all manner of acerbic chemicals. The cops said there was nothing left, nothing physical of interest to them anyway—they’d taken everything they’d needed —your son’s hard-drive with all the files, the data, your son — so you could go ahead and bleach everything if you felt it would make things better. It didn’t.
Even after five days of hard labour and six bottles of industrial-strength bleach, in that room, his room, the smell, the stench of immeasurable shame, still remained.
Some evenings, the air fryer’s beep catches you unaware, as if it’s coming from the wrong direction. Sometimes the hum of its internal fan follows a beating rhythm, ascending in pace and fury. And sometimes you think you hear it upstairs, coming from your son’s bedroom. And more recently, because it’s just the two of you alone in the house, and every sound seems to come with a haunting, when it reaches its finish line and informs you that dinner is ready, you swear the beep it should normally make sounds like more of a pained squeal.
But your air fryer doesn’t know. It can’t know, can it? It can’t know, and it can’t judge. It doesn’t look at you with that sideways glance like Mrs. Delaney across the street always does. Doesn’t greet you with the silence of an anechoic chamber like your colleagues have done since the headlines hit. After the police came and frog-marched away your cuffed boy. It doesn’t remember your name in the news. Doesn’t say “parent of the accused” with that tight, careful tone. It doesn’t mention “indecent and prohibited images of minors.”
The fryer beeps. Wails. Grunts. With a trembling hand, you take the basket out and shake the tofu until each piece falls away from the other, just like the video said. You think of Jenny from Reprographics and her tight, nuclear family and how you got close enough to overhear her telling Gina from HR about the fantastic website she found this tofu recipe on that is apparently simply to die for, and your hands steady enough for you to bring the basket of crispy goodness close enough to your nose so you can inhale the novel aroma: nutty, beany, potential deliverance. As you tap it out onto your plate on the kitchen table laid out for one, you can almost forget all the things you want to forget and focus on playing out your best-case-scenario at work, the hows and whens of dropping your opinion on the flavour of this marinade into casual conversation and actually being heard.
With the right appliance, the right meal, the right angle of a photo of this “Green Goddess Bowl with Crispy Sesame Tofu,” maybe you can stitch yourself back into society, inch by inch? The air fryer is your ticket. Perhaps.
You flick on the television, and as the bongs of the opening theme of the evening news strike like bullets to your heart, you switch over to QVC. Salvation, if momentary, at least.
You shut your eyes and place your nose again close to the food on your plate and inhale and try to ignore the sound of sneakers slapping down your path like they do every evening while you sit in your kitchen trying to eat. Silence again. On opening your eyes, you almost scream at the brightness of it all, the dissonance of your life. Deep breaths. Deep breaths.
Toppings, extras, little acts of kindness might make everything better, you think, so you dollop on a generous spoonful of hot sauce and garnish your plate with a sprig of coriander.
But before you lift a forkful to your mouth, you have to peg your nose because what has been posted through your letterbox and deposited on your doormat is frankly, in its freshness, a little repugnant. In your right hand, you hold your fork tighter, with the grip of a mother holding her toddler’s hand at the edge of a dangerous road, and you don’t think about tofu or dog shit, you think of children, can’t think of anything but children. Such very young children. Then you think of your child—your thirty-two-year-old son—and force yourself to take a bite.
But it tastes like everything else. Undertones of bile and shame. You spit it out into a tissue and toss it into the bin.
Maybe you haven’t tried enough recipes? Maybe you need a better appliance?
You turn up the volume on QVC and add more salt, more coriander to your food, then you chew and chew and swallow, but this dinner, like every other, in essence, still disgusts you. Awful. What on earth will ever take the taste away? You get up, open the cupboard under the kitchen sink, and lift out one of four large blue plastic bottles — the remnants of another QVC bulk purchase — crack open the child-proof cap, and, into a chipped oversized mug, pour out a viscous half-pint. That should wash down the lump stuck in your throat.
You don’t drink it. Obviously. You don’t actually drink it, but with every forkful of fodder you force in, you certainly think about how the fluid would slide down. How clean it would be. How quick.
You mute the television because you already own three spiralizers, and you stare at your empty dish, the green goddess bowl now scraped to beige, and around you, the quiet begins to harden again, like concrete. Like rigor mortis.
The presenter’s lips keep moving. You scrape the tines of your fork on the porcelain and then drag them across the veneer of your table top. In the hallway, the letterbox again snaps shut.
Something that does not sound light like an envelope lands in your hallway. Splat. No further sound than that. No knock. Just another offensive deposit.
You leave it there along with all the others. Of course you do. Because no matter how much effort you make in trying to clear things up, the deliveries will continue to come.
You wash the plate. You dry it. You put it back on the stack. Then you stand there and stare at the air fryer.
Its matte black face gleams under the kitchen light. Its drawer is open. Just a little. That’s how you like to leave it, ajar slightly, like a mouth beginning to open. A mouth that, perhaps one day, might emit a few words of remorse.
The air fryer’s electrical cord looks longer than it did before, when it first arrived. And it’s twisted and pulsing slightly, all funiculus umbilicalis. Longer and longer the plastic-encased wiring seems to stretch, until, somewhere around its midpoint, it appears as thin as a fine blonde hair. Thin enough to snap. You bend down to examine the cable more closely and then crimp your eyes and rub them with the butts of your hands. The cable: it’s just a regular cable. The device: it’s just a midrange air fryer. Until it isn’t anymore. It’s a baby. Your baby. And you want to lift the entire device up in your arms and swaddle it and rock it, but you don’t. Instead, you line your face up with the open drawer. Oh, the shape of it. The sheen. You and the drawer, kiss close. But you don’t kiss it, of course you don’t, because it’s still only a machine, isn’t it? A machine. But the impulse is there. Your desire is so strong. Yet you manage to refrain.
You stand up and crack your lower back and let out a sorrowful sigh before closing the little drawer. And with great consideration, you close the drawer slowly, gently, as if you’re putting something to bed.
And then—
A sound.
A shriek? A grunt?
A beep.
Did it come from your device?
There’s nothing inside it to heat and fry, and you didn’t press any of the buttons.
You didn’t.
You stand still for a long time. Just breathing. Just listening. Mulling. Observing. Waiting to see if it makes any more noise or lets out a secondary squeal.
You look at the fryer, the soft orange light glowing from within it, and you wonder. Is something still inside it? Something you put there with no malicious or deliberate intent? Is there perhaps a carby residue or a scrap of protein, or a seed buried deep, a seed that could grow into something unsavory maybe, stuck at the back, in between the fascias, which is making it misbehave? You adjust the hand-knitted scarf that you carefully crafted for your boy for his twentieth birthday that you’ve draped around your device, and you caress his old school photograph that you’ve sticky-taped on just above the LED-lit touch-screen interface, that good shot of him when he was just knee-high to a high knee, the one where he still has a glimmer of innocence, surely it’s innocence, in his eyes.
You lean on the countertop and reach for the plug. Not to switch it off. Just to feel it in your hand, the weight of it all, just perhaps to hold it to your face and sniff it, pick at it, like the way a mother, with a love, with a desire for others to see the potential for beauty she sees in her own flesh and blood, removes the encrusted, acrid, cradle cap from her newborn’s scalp.
But as your fingers make contact, the machine beeps again.
Louder this time, and glitchy. Erratic, like a warning siren sucked through a time tunnel. This catches you quite off guard and drops you back, stone down a well, into the solitary confinement of your semi-detachedness.
You let go. You let go of the plug, the edge of the countertop, you let go of everything you’ve been holding on to and drop your arms by your sides and step back. And then you step back again.
And you stand there, alone in the kitchen, and reach out instead for the certainty of the chipped, oversized mug, of your drink, and the air fryer display lights up and the timer starts counting down from a number you don’t remember setting.
Want another gripping story from SJ Townend? Read “When One Door Closes” in Horrific Scribes, December 2025.
| EXHIBIT THREE: Return to “The Herman Condition“ | Proceed to the first Gallery Two: Domestic Betrayal attraction, “Guilt“ |