Magpie Tales: buying soup

Each week, a Magpie Tales photo prompt arrives from Willow Manor, and each week we are given the opportunity to write something about it, or to write something inspired by it, or even to write a review of it (but few ever do that).

This week's prompt features a 1960s photo of Andy Warhol buying soup and paper towels.

Here is my submission to Mag 106:

Andy was young, and living alone, so his mom had given him a book for Christmas: 100 Recipes Using Cream of Mushroom Soup, and the book, in turn, gave him an idea. He would buy different kinds of soup, different colors of soup, different thicknesses and consistencies of soup, and pour a can of each onto the top of an open roll of paper towels, to see how each kind of soup behaved. Would the mushroom soup grow fungi? Would the tomato soup ooze like blood? Would the cream of asparagus soup run greenly down the paper-towel-slope like industrial waste? Would the alphabet soup get its letters together to register an objection to the entire process? He had to know, and he had to turn his results into a kind of art the public had never seen.