The steak-fork attack over the sound of peanut butter

pivotal · ~early Nov YDAU, reported 4 Nov

• When: shortly before 4 Nov YDAU (the attack is recounted, fresh, in the 4 Nov transcript; the dinner itself is undated — inference flagged).
• What: A resident complains to Pat Montesian: at dinner, waiting for meatloaf to cool, there came "a simply sphincter-loosening shriek" and "here's Nell in the air with a steak-fork, positively aloft, leaping across the table, in flight, horizontal," body literally parallel to the tabletop, "shrieking something about the sound of peanut butter" — the trigger apparently the speaker's tapping on the table. The fork went through the speaker's hand into the table: "Gately and Diehl had to pull the fork out of my hand and the tabletop both." At the emergency room he refused the offered Percocet as a person in recovery. Nell's offered settlement — "she ever so magnaminously says she'll apologize if I will" ("magnaminously" as printed) — enrages him further: he demands "that she be kicked out of here on her enormous rear-end," derides "her Hefty bag full of gauche clothes," and ends on an ultimatum: that specimen goes or he does. The transcript never names its speaker (see Dating notes) — but Nell's side of it does reach the page: the scene's opening transcript block is her own deadpan first-person account, the drumming rendered as "the way you see somebody picking at dead skin," "the sound of a fucking mind coming apart," the act itself minimized to "I sort of poked him with my fork," capped with an offer to "make amends at like anytime" and a worry about losing an already-approved Overnight.