Imagine myself a fortune cookie broken up by an unsuspecting fat boy who has crammed so much Chinese buffet food into his throat that it’s actually piled high to the end of his esophagus. I have sat there on the table well past when the young Asian woman placed a receipt on the table. My plastic shines like a lighthouse warning other foods not to come near him.
When the waitress came with the check, she tried to play him off stage politely, but he ate right through it all. She said, “Thanks for coming,” and he nodded his head in a show of acknowledgement.
From throat to rectum, his insides are a meticulously stuffed system of human piping. At the top of the heap, lo mein. Pounds of it, probably. Right under that sits a mashed pile of crab rangoon like sour cream flecked with pink. Under that still sits a sturdy castle of bourbon chicken that goes all the way down. Half of it has been forced through his system into intestines so taught they may burst.
Finally, he surrenders. He sweats globules like cannon balls and wipes himself dry with the back of a hand that weighs about as much as a premature infant. He somehow finesses the plastic wrap off of me and cracks me in half. A little paper slips out from my vinyl-like cookie abdomen. He reads the fortune. “You good boy you be good forever.” He pumps his fist in a mockery of earned reward.
He gets up. Doesn’t eat me. I have never been so blessed. I have never been so blessed to be eviscerated and left here to be thrown away in the trash, living another century until all the parts of me are powdered in a landfill, my styrofoam-like genetic makeup being spread across miles upon miles of trash that will decay before I waste into nothingness.