The Evolution of Meat

This unpalatable tale comes from one of our affiliates. As you know, in 2004 forensic inspectors reopened the underground nuclear reactor at Chernobyl and discovered some purple saprophytic fungi growing on the reactor parts, feeding off of radiation making it one of the few known organisms that can live completely without the Sun. What you may not know is that same year the reactor cooling pond next to the plant was drained (because some locals had been fishing in it and posted photos of a giant Wels catfish with two mouths). When the pond was dry they discovered something unexpected at the bottom of it; mired in decades of muck were several tons of discarded equipment including a small refrigerator truck that was remarkably preserved. As they were towing it out one of the inspectors pointed to it and said “Don’t ever open that”.

Meat truck driver Sam Vinge happened to be out making deliveries when there was a fender-bender directly on the highway ahead of him. An enormous flatbed that took up both lanes of the road was carrying a load of junk covered in plastic, and made a sharp right turn causing the weight of its load to shift to one side until it keeled over and spilled across the ground. Sam swerved into the grass and his little truck flipped over itself, throwing him from the vehicle. He hit his head and was knocked out.

Moments later Sam regained his senses and looked around him in a daze. The flatbed had jackknifed and the driver was either dead or had left the scene. He was surrounded by debris that looked like scrap metal covered in algae. Sam felt dizzy and disoriented but did not yet realize he had lost his sense of smell.

He stumbled over to his vehicle which had miraculously landed back on its wheels, and sat down in the driver’s seat which felt damp and for some reason the engine wouldn’t start. A small tow truck happened to be the first Samaritan to pull over; the driver looked briefly under the hood saying he could see why the engine wouldn’t go, and offered to give him a tow adding that he couldn’t do anything for the flatbed or the rest of the debris.

Sam nodded and after the meat truck was loaded, checked the back to see if the refrigerator was still working (the company had been using these same trucks for 30 years). It wasn’t, but the wrapped meat seemed to be in good condition so he asked the driver if he could help him make his deliveries and in return he could keep one of the steaks for himself.

At the end of the day Sam was brought home and the empty truck left in the driveway with the exception of his own dinner. He still felt disoriented and unable to make decisions, the house was swimming before him and when his wife Mitzi greeted him he simply tossed the cellophane-wrapped steak onto the table.

As she unwrapped it and placed it in a frying pan, she said “Honey come look at this”.

Sam returned from the fridge with a beer and saw that the “eye” of the ribeye (which is usually a slice of bone) was a human eye glaring angrily at them from the steak. Sam backed away from the table.

“I suppose we could just cut out the bad spot…” Mitzi was saying. Sam struggled to think of how someone’s eye could possibly have gotten in there. A finger maybe in the processing… He felt like he was going to pass out, so she helped him into bed leaving the steak sitting there.

As soon as the lights were out, the steak began to lift itself on thousands of little black hairs that covered its underside like the tendrils on a sea urchin. It dropped to the floor and gradually made its way across the room in a span of twenty minutes.

Sam suddenly awoke from a nightmare, his head throbbing and he looked deliriously at the alarm clock which read 3:30 AM. Then he flipped on the lamp. Everything seemed normal until he glanced over at his wife lying next him and her face was the ribeye steak! 

“Honey what’s the matter?” Mitzi sat up and looked at him with the steak’s one bulging eye, the strap of her nightdress falling off her bare shoulder. “Don’t you find me attractive anymore?”

Sam rushed out of the room into the kitchen, looking for something to defend himself with but she was right on his heels, eyeballing him curiously.

“You know, I think we should get rid of all the knives in the house…” Mitzi turned to the drawer and started going through it.

Sam tried the back door but couldn’t get it to open. He retreated into the den where the coals from a fire were still smoldering in the fireplace, and for some reason all of the irons were sticking out of it. He pulled out a branding iron that looked like a waffle, the end of it smoking and went back into the kitchen wielding it.

The steak-woman had turned on the oven, opened the door and was sticking her face in it.

“Do you smell something?” she asked even though she had no nose. When she saw him holding the iron she jolted up and banged the back of her head.

“Ow!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing? I think I’m bleeding, come over here and take a look at it.”

She flipped her blonde hair forward to feel her scalp. “Where’s a mirror? I might need to see a doctor or something.”

Minutes later they were on the road, although Sam felt there might be something wrong with him. He looked over and the van next to them seemed to have a rack of ribs sitting at the steering wheel motioning for him to move forward. Sam suddenly thought of all those deliveries he had made yesterday.

As they stepped into the waiting room an entire side of beef turned and looked at him from one of the chairs. Next to it was seated what looked like a large chunk of pork fatback dressed as a boy, with an overstuffed striped shirt, Coke-bottle glasses and a beanie.

Sam and Mitzi took a seat in the examination room. The doctor’s face was covered in raw ground beef whose strands formed a neatly-pointed beard and curled above his ears in a ring around his bald head, the edges already going gray.

“So what can I do for the two of you today?” he asked cordially.

“Well I think I need some polysporin.” the steak sniffed. “But what I’d really like to talk about is… freshness. What should I be doing about skin care if I’m out in the sun? And I also seem to have an unnatural fear of dogs.”

“Perfectly understandable. None of us is getting any younger!” the doctor pointed to his graying temples. “Some women have been standing in front of the open fridge as an alternative to tanning beds. I know it wasn’t designed for that, but we were actually discussing an experimental new procedure this morning.”

He got out some transparencies, and remembering Sam was sitting there motioned for Mitzi to come closer so he could show her privately.

“He’s been acting very strangely since he got home from work yesterday.” the steak whispered. “He doesn’t look at me the same way, it’s almost as if I’m no longer a woman to him.”

“You are a very attractive lady.” the doctor placed his hand on hers. “Show this to him, maybe it will rekindle the flame?” He removed what looked like a deck of large playing cards from the desk drawer and slipped one of them to her which she pocketed.

Sam bolted from his chair and demanded to see what they were. The doctor turned them over and spread them across the desk. They were black-and-white illustrations that seemed to have no common theme except that they were grotesque, like something Charles Addams would draw. The first card showed two men dining at a restaurant, a thin man and a jovial, fatter man laughing and clapping his friend on the back. The second card had the same scene but the fatter man was now slamming his friend’s face down into his plate of food, his eyes bulging with hysterics. The third card showed a family in mourning sitting at a dinner table, their faces looking up in shock at their father coming in the front door with presents under his arms, the right side of his brain exposed and connected to his stomach with some kind of veins. The fourth card showed a woman whose face was in shadow sneaking up on her husband asleep in bed with a syringe in her hand. The last card which he took from Mitzi’s hand was difficult to put in words. It showed a woman who had just returned home from the hospital to a dining room decked with flowers, and a large cooking pot had fallen from the stove onto the floor from which something that looked like a ball of dough with eyes was emerging and shaking its fist at them.

“They’re just suggestions…” the doctor started to say.

Sam ran out the door and down the hall with Mitzi crying out “Wait Honey!” on his heels. She pursued him through the radiology department where an X-ray was taking place, and after she ran through an image of her face came up on the screen showing the T-bone of the steak.

Sam emerged out the back door breathing heavily. As he stopped to catch his breath he looked across the parking lot and noticed one of the restaurants that had taken his deliveries yesterday was directly behind the building. It was closed until further notice, so said a sign on the door that looked like it had been written by a blind person.

Sam curiously approached and knocked on the glass even though the lights were off inside. The door opened a crack and a gurgling, sloppy voice said “Yessss?”.

“Sorry to bother you. I’m the delivery guy who dropped off an order yesterday.” Sam explained. “I was just wondering if there was something wrong with the shipment? Is that why you’re closed?”

“Um, no. We’re closed because we’ve got something in here we’re trying to protect from customers.” the voice answered, a trace of black liquid squirting out. “We have a responsibility to safeguard our livers… I mean, our lives.”

Sam’s head started throbbing again and he felt he was going to pass out.

“By the way,” the voice spoke, “do you know how to get rid of stray dogs?”.

He started to keel over backwards, barely catching himself as he dropped down to the pavement and lost consciousness. The door opened and in his mind’s eye he felt people were gathered around him with concern, possibly staff from the clinic next door, and that he had only imagined the parking lot was empty and this whole business.

He was placed on a stretcher and carried inside. He could hear voices passing in and out of earshot, clinical workers he thought, but couldn’t make out their sentences. Then what sounded like a child’s voice said “Who is that? And why does he look so strange?”.

“He’s going to be of use to us. Let’s get him up on the table.” one of the adults responded, and Sam’s eye opened to reveal he was in absolute darkness.

“Oh goodie!” the child’s voice sounding like wet leather slapping. “He’s one of us now! He’s one of us now!!”