Finger Buffet

The finger rolled under the dessert table like it had somewhere important to be.

Honestly, I should've seen this coming. When your catering business is called "Bite-Sized Dreams" and you're serving a room full of drunk investment bankers, things are bound to get weird. But I never thought I'd be crawling around on all fours at the Meridian Hotel, trying to fish out a severed pinky from under a pile of mini quiches.

"Excuse me" Some guy in a terrible tie grabbed my shoulder. "The shrimp puffs are getting cold."

"Yeah, well, join the club," I muttered, still on my hands and knees. "Everything's going to hell anyway."

It started about two hours ago. I was setting up the finger buffet for Henderson & Associates' quarterly meeting. You know the type, tiny sandwiches, little meatballs on sticks, stuff you can grab with one hand while you're lying through your teeth to clients with the other.

Marley, my assistant, was arranging the salmon canapés when she started acting weird. More weird than usual, I mean. The girl already had this habit of talking to the food like it could hear her.

"These look a bit... off," she said, poking at the shrimp with her tongs.

"Off how?" I was busy trying to make the cheese cubes look less like dog treats.

"I dunno. Just... wrong somehow."

But we were running late, and Mr. Henderson was already giving me that look rich people give you when they think you're about to screw up their precious event. So I told Marley to quit being dramatic and just put the damn things out.

Big mistake.

The first guy to grab a shrimp roll started choking about five minutes later. Not like normal choking, more like his throat was trying to turn itself inside out. Then his buddy started gagging too. Then the whole room erupted into this symphony of retching and gasping.

That's when I noticed the finger sitting there on the appetizer platter, right between the stuffed mushrooms and the bacon-wrapped scallops.

A actual human finger. Pink and slightly wrinkled, like it had been in water too long. With a wedding ring still on it.

I grabbed Marley by the arm. "What the hell did you put in the shrimp?"

"Nothing! I swear, Dex, I just--" She stopped mid-sentence, staring at the finger buffet table. "Oh my god. Oh my god, is that...?"

"Yeah." I was already reaching for my phone to call 911 when Henderson appeared next to us, looking like he wanted to feed me to his lawyers.

"What exactly is happening here?" His voice was all controlled fury, the kind that makes your blood pressure spike.

"There's been a... situation," I said, trying to block his view of the severed digit. "Food poisoning, maybe. We should probably-"

"Food poisoning?" He pushed past me and saw the finger. His face went through about six different shades of green. "Is that a body part?"

"Technically, it's just a small body part," Marley offered helpfully.

I wanted to strangle her.

The paramedics showed up first, then the cops, then what looked like half the health department. They shut down the whole buffet, obviously. Started asking questions about our suppliers, our prep methods, whether we'd noticed anything suspicious about the seafood delivery.

But here's the thing; I knew our suppliers. Been working with the same fish guy for three years. Tony's Catch of the Day. Tony's got problems, sure, but serving up human remains isn't one of them.

The detective, this tired-looking woman named Reeves, kept pressing me about the finger. Where did it come from? How long had it been there? Did I know who it belonged to?

"Look," I told her, "I've been in this business for eight years. I've seen moldy cheese, I've seen mystery meat, I've even seen a mouse in a soup pot. But I've never seen a human finger just... appear in my food setup."

She didn't look convinced.

The real kicker came when they were packing up the evidence. One of the crime scene techs held up the finger in a little plastic bag and said, "Looks like it was severed pretty recently. Maybe within the last few hours."

That's when it hit me. The delivery this morning; Tony's usual guy hadn't shown up. Some new kid brought our order, seemed nervous as hell. Kept checking his watch, wouldn't make eye contact.

"Detective Reeves," I called out as she was heading for the door. "I think I know where to start looking."

She turned back, eyebrows raised.

"Our seafood delivery this morning. Different guy than usual. Real jumpy. And now that I think about it..." I paused, trying to remember exactly what had bothered me about the kid. "He had a bandage on his left hand. A big one."

Reeves pulled out her notebook again. "You get his name?"

"No, but I've got Tony's number. He'll know who he sent."

Three hours later, they arrested the delivery kid at his apartment. Turns out he'd been skimming product from the restaurant supply company, selling it on the side for extra cash. But when his boss started getting suspicious, the kid panicked. Tried to destroy the evidence by feeding it into the industrial grinder at the warehouse.

Only problem was, he was wearing his wedding ring at the time.

The finger had gotten mixed in with our shrimp order. Just dumb luck—or the worst kind of luck, depending on how you look at it.

Henderson's company still sued me, of course. Said I was negligent, that I should've noticed a human finger mixed in with the shrimp. Like I spend my days checking seafood for random body parts.

But the story got picked up by the local news, and suddenly everyone wanted to hire the caterer who'd accidentally solved a crime. "Bite-Sized Dreams: Where Every Meal's a Mystery," the headline read.

I should've been insulted. Instead, I raised my prices.

Marley quit after that, said she couldn't handle the pressure. Last I heard, she was working at a bakery downtown, probably having long conversations with cupcakes.

Me? I kept the business running. But now I check every single item that comes through my kitchen. Every shrimp, every scallop, every tiny piece of salmon.

You'd be amazed what people will try to pass off as food these days.

An entry to 3 June 2025, @mariannewest's Freewrite Writing Prompt Day 2756: finger buffet

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