By Zoé Mahfouz
Yes, Elise, I’m talking about you. Ever since you got all those positive Google reviews, you changed. You made the cheese prices go up faster than Cynthia Erivo in Defying Gravity. Seventy euros per kilogram for a Beaufort? I might as well buy the cow itself for that price. You tried to sell us the salmon eaten by “the Queen of Denmark” as if we were attending a Bridgerton ball, right after your pathetic attempt at lumbering us with your farmer’s friend’s uncooked bread and your wild garlic cheese that ended up in the compost for the worms to enjoy.
You pretend that hygiene is your number one priority, yet you let your employees lick their fingers before packing up the cheeses right in front of the customers, just like foetuses do in their mothers’ wombs. You might as well let them lap milk off the floor, like Nicole Kidman does in Babygirl; at least that would be edgy. But let’s face it, you could never. Your lack of reasoning and problem-solving skills could be explained by the smoked cheese currently replacing your cerebral cortex.
You got your feelings hurt when my mother told you we also bought cheese at Laurent Dubois’s shop, a cheese master who won Best Craftsman of France, yet you align your prices with his, even though you’re a nobody with a growth on her forehead and a little cheese shop in one of France’s poorest suburbs. And don’t give me that talk about gentrification already. You and I both know the only reason you planted your shop here is that you couldn’t afford to be in Paris itself…which would also explain why you hired your 70-year-old mom to work with you in the back of the shop, instead of paying her a proper countryside retreat like a decent human being; unless, of course, you find a way to milk her too.
But sure, keep making us pay for it by selling us expired goat’s milk cheese, because we deserve to be poisoned with food for your bad life choices. “But we have loads of bills to pay!” And we don’t? Your cheese store stinks so much that if Lily-Rose Depp decided to hide from Nosferatu there, she’d still be alive.
But hey, don’t lose hope! Maybe you could throw your cheeses in the River Seine to spread a bit more E. coli for the open water swimmers at the next Paris Olympics?
Zoé Mahfouz is an award-winning actress, screenwriter and content creator. Her own writings have been featured in 20+ literary magazines and best-of anthologies across the globe. Her short screenplays and TV pilots have been recognised in Film Festivals worldwide.
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