The Garbage Cans
As the bones and soups of blood are thrown out, a sound is made. Ploshing. Sloshing. Flofing. Every day, anyone who eats tosses some leftovers into the cans. Like some big dark pit, it all falls into the garbage cans. Soups make the most noise. As the dark, viscous fluid flows out of bowls, it splatters into the cans, but the noise the bones make always lingers longer in my head. Plop! Schlop! Flop! It's more direct, more POW! Every day after they eat, the sound comes, and the garbage piles up.
If it bothered me I could quit, but I know my place. My thought capability is limited to four dimensions. I can't do advanced algorithms without help. I’m not a retard. I get relativity and basic quantum mechanics, but average concepts like existential string theory are too hard. Existing in twelve parallel planes of reality at once is too much. Something's busted in the connection between my mind and my sensory organs, so I'm not in touch with all the different dimensions of existence. Doctors say I'm just slow. It’s OK, though. I'm happy.
I’m the cook, and everybody likes my food. The trick is lots of oil. Lots of frozen meats come in. Thighs can be so different: some are skinny, some are small, and some are long. Some months back, we started using a supplier that advertised its product as bodybuilder meat. Thighs packed with dense muscle. Cords of rippling veins coursed through thick pieces of tender flesh packed with meat. It was too good to be true: this company was using steroids to jack up their meat.
Big thighs.
It's like this: all those crazy 11th dimensional groups, the ones hugging every amoeba and protecting every species, were right. The company selling the big thighs used human bodybuilders, gave the humans a bunch of steroids. Here's the crazy part: the company selling the bodybuilder meat, a damn multi-planetary corporation, knew humans were sentient beings. They knew the big rippling thighs and breasts were not only a result of steroids, but also a peculiar ritual behavior; this behavior tipped off the companies to humanities' free will.
Those extreme 11th dimensional groups proved us wrong. They said humans could feel, really feel, not just pain but sorrow. You have to understand, when we first came to Earth, the food companies published studies backed by supposedly independent scientists saying humans weren’t intelligent beings. Humans, we were told, are dependent on a hive society. Take a human and put him on an island, and he will not make it. Humans kill each other all the time, and even in their functional societies, they just train their young to propagate their parents' post in society.
The real kicker, the one proving humanity lacks real intelligent thought: humans use a physical form of transportation based on burning organic compounds. Their cars and planes use fuel in order to manipulate Earth's basic forces of gravity, lift, velocity, and speed to move simple distances. These fuels are formed over time from the deceased remains of the planet's organisms into what is commonly referred to as oil. From our primordial history to our inter-dimensional travel, we never burned our ancient ones to move three-dimensional distances.
After everyone found out humanity is intelligent, nobody stopped talking about the human dilemma. Humans are sentient beings. They are conscious of their own existence. They even use silicon-based technology to communicate digitally. I know: it's pathetic. Even in our dark ages, we weren’t that stupid. Their highest technology can be boiled down to a series of ones and zeros. To humanity, though, it's an achievement.
So, those groups for the Ethical Treatment of Humans stole files from the company that documented the peculiar human behavior of the bodybuilder, and how unhealthy the pumped-up meat is, lacking in any nutritional value. The companies don’t use the bodybuilders for meat anymore, but we keep eating the humans because why would the all-influencing creator have evolved species like humans, which give us nutritional sustenance, if we weren't meant to eat them? Still, it's a big controversy. You don’t even want to hear all the crazy talk surrounding the human caviar issue.
All I know is this: the meats comes in, I cook the food. The garbage cans. They fill up. Bloody soups: Schlooop! Bones: Ploop! Oily meats: Whop! When the cans fill up, I take out the trash.
BIO:
J.E. Moskowitz's short fiction has been published in
365Tomorrows.com and Midnight in Hell e-zine. He has
worked in Thailand for an import company, and taught English to
Sudanese refugees in Israel's Negev Desert.