The meat that we eat.
The meat that we eat.
The meat that we eat.
Is yummy, yummy, yummy.
In my tummy, tummy, tummy!
The youngsters on their way to Academy each morning sing this little ditty, and the wheels on the electric bus go around and around. But it wasn’t the same vision of meat we ate before The Great Reckoning. Today, our meat is an undisclosed recipe, heavily guarded and engineered in vast antiseptic laboratories. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are flushed speedily through a maze of plastic pipes, steamed, pressed, cured, flavor-enhanced, and extruded—sold for .99 cents a can. The ingredient list was quietly removed some time ago.
We can purchase three cans for two bucks during The Week of Calming, when Christmas was, and the chemical compounds are seasonally adjusted.
Hollow-eyed and sunken cheeks, skin as gray as the grayest beards on the grayest faces driving gray sedans under gray clouds that drool charcoal rain, they prowl the streets, Company Men, always prowling and scribbling notes. They are there when they are not there, and we know to keep our eyes fixed on…nothing. I once recall seeing a sharp-eyed dog leading a blind man down a flight of steep stone stairs at the Courthouse, but I registered no outward reaction. There are no dogs today. No blind men, either. The Courthouse is now a tomb for meaningless petitions before the hanging judges’ rule.
Do what you like with that information, and be careful how you walk. And how you think.
From birth to death, there is only gray now. But children, being children, make do, laughing with tongues out stuck, prancing and dancing, the rhythms of the chemicals operating in their arteries and snapping in their synapses. Over time, they become us, though it begins in the womb nowadays because of improved absorption rates from Mother to child. Many necessary and failed experiments were piloted to achieve this successful outcome. The Advertising Cooperative went wild promoting it. I should know. It was my campaign and my jingle, and I have the awards to prove it. I keep them locked in a desk drawer behind a door I never open.
Time to sleep, children. Eat your meat, the loudspeakers spew at dusk.
It’s yummy, yummy, yummy!
Time to wake, children. Eat your meat, the loudspeakers spew at dawn.
It’s yummy, yummy, yummy!
And the gray eyes rise.
And the gray sedans rev.
And it all begins again.
In my tummy, tummy, tummy!