The Most Important Ingredient

Our vision is tinted the monochromatic gray of silent films. I'm unhinged. Frames of mind, frames per second, picture frames and even the righteous have been framed. Ugly is photogenic! Look at the fear-mongering headlines, gear your focus towards the resources you exploit for your own personal gain only to go to bed at night bewildered by this buried sense of deprivation. A putrefying hand reaching out the ground to drag you six feet under, that's a long way down from the heaven you built for yourself. A barricaded blimp in suspended animation, daylight spilling through the gaps between planks every so often. It's been about a fortnight since everything stopped, half as long since they finally left us alone. I've rationed the food, there's a kitchen aboard rather modest, the kind you'd expect from a campervan but when your stomach is so empty it's digesting the gastric acid, the ends justify the means. My dad's crafted murals out of the cheapest tools available making even Rembrandt appear amateurish.

I've readied the makeshift table salivating all the while over the aroma filling my belly then a moment later escaping, as close as you can safely get to a model who sticks two fingers down the back of her throat to maintain an image and that's what this is all about; an image. Not a photograph, not that this reality is some hologram, not even perception itself... you ever seen an unpublished bestseller? You are reading my mind. I think about fasting, I think about the etymology of the word 'breakfast' and I think of those who eat the sun ritualistically every morning sungazing. Mind, body & soul. If I was immortal I'd eventually make every choice possible sooner or later taking a bite out of that forbidden fruit, and that's apparently what got us in this mess. I'd have savored every bite not before baking it into an apple pie crowd-surfing my taste buds leaving them in a state of potent euphoria, flavoring to fetishize for decades after. You'll never find a recipe like that in your grandmother's cookbook.

Here is that fateful moment reimagined. I don't bother with silverware, etiquette in a world without civilization is for those still living in denial. My jaw aches from non-stop chewing but every mouthful is better than the last, I haven't even paused to breathe. I reach for another scoop and chomp, the apple chunks are unrivaled in sweetness. I pat my swelling abdomen with glee and notice my shirt is soaked in blood, I trace the stain to my lips and spit my food out instinctively. It's gushing like a fountain, if I closed my mouth I'd drown. Oh. HAHAHA!! I was feasting on an assortment of paraphernalia beneath the motherboard I tore out of the cockpit in a frenzied panic to land this piece of crap a few days back. I can't open the first aid kit, lost my fingers to the starvation. I had drawn smiley faces on each one so I'll call them casualties, never thought I'd host a Thyestean banquet. The worst part about all of this is I really had a pie waiting on the stove this entire time.