Dear readers, you will never believe what happened today. But, if you continue to read, you may at least find it slightly entertaining.
I was, by bureaucratic mishaps, invited to cover the newest menu at the Krang Grand Hotel restaurant. Yes, you know the place. Big — grand, you might aptly say — littered with people with enough money to purchase all your past lives (and they can do that now, if you read my upcoming entry).
I, Skroom, paraded inside, flashing my invitation to the guards — of which there were many — and I delivered my most charming of smiles — of which many were wide. The decorum was fashionable. Old, violet vases stolen from the Brepgloppian empire, filled with flowers as tall and flesh-eating as those long mutated sticks down by the Gnard. The guests were of equal standards, all primped from birth with the finest accoutrements, their haughty, dead eyes staring ahead.
The host seated me upon a linen-clad table and brought me a velour chair to eat from. No, that is not a spelling error. It’s all the rage nowadays, reverse eating. You sit all high and mighty on your chair, leaning over like a long-necked animal to munch on whatever feed they dish you. After that you pretend to like it and you rate it high enough for them to invite you again. It’s the circle of life in the food critic industry, which is why I know I was invited by mistake.
Unhappsnappingly, I thought, rather dismayed. I detest eating with blood rushing to my brain. It is much more quiet and calm the less blood it has. The host must have noticed my demeanour, for he teleported by my side and spoke:
“We practice the ancient philosophy of humiliation. You see, the wealthy come here to experience what they never felt before — pain, suffering, and first-hand embarrassment. No second-hand embarrassment allowed here, as those sensations are intrinsic among the upper echelons.”
He looked at me, up and down, perhaps considering if my very presence would invoke that dreaded second-hand embarrassment upon their clientele. Little did he know that I, Skroom, possess no such thing as first or second-hand embarrassment, and that I excel at navigating spaces that fear them.
He served me a plate with two, very ordinary-looking sausages, and when I grabbed the correct fork to use for such a meal he seemed happy enough to leave me be for a few minutes.
I gazed upon the sausage, and yes, I understood. For — oh — isn’t a sausage the very symbol of all those things? You must suffer through life only to be met with the pain of death and the embarrassment of being shoved up your own intestine as a spineless mass. Is there no haven where we can find respite? Do we have only the safe spaces within our minds when we are deformed only to be eaten by a rich prick who considers our humiliation a mere spectacle to pity and enjoy?
The waiter had won me over, but he did not know I would consume this meal in its unintended way. I bent over my plate, feeling blood rushing to my head, eyeing the sausage not as a consumer, but as a long-lost friend. We are here together, I thought. I will hide your shame within me. Become part of you. You will regain your dignity all the while I lose mine. It is all momentary, my gelatinous friend, for I now see this cycle for what it is. The sausage, however, spoke very little in return. But it wasn’t silent either.
“Glorp,” it said, just as it disappeared behind my maw. Had I been a dog my ears would have gone up. Glorp?
The waiter leaned in. “They know the secrets of the universe, these sausages.” He smiled like a mannequin. “Maybe not all the secrets, but the ones that would drive you to madness if you heard them, they most certainly know. It’s a beautiful thing, don’t you think? The most esteemed of us enjoy the fact that they sit in front of the most knowledgeable sausage in the world, but care so little about anything that eating it doesn’t matter to them. Imagine being so powerful that you can eat something all-knowing, and with so little regard!” His eyes gleamed. “To this day, no one knows what the sausages want.” He leaned in and whispered into my ear like a lover. “We don’t even know where they come from.”
He then ended this unsavoury conversation with a light laugh. “As long as you do not speak to them, all is well.”
“Good gods…” At this point, a shiver went down my back. I realised why I had not been invited legally. It wasn’t because I wasn’t a food critic, but the fact that I am not rich enough to not converse with a sausage.
Once the waiter left me alone, I prodded the remaining sausage with a greasy finger, and whispered, “Pardon me, but… Did you hear what the waiter said?”
The sausage said nothing, so I crouched onto the floor to level with it, perhaps to invoke more equality between the two of us, especially considering I just ate one of them. What can I say? I am sympathetic like that.
“Excuse me,” I said again. “I heard the glorp of your… friend? I am sorry about that. I didn’t know you knew the secrets of the universe and—”
“Does that matter?” spoke the sausage, in a strange voice, much darker than you would expect from a sausage. “Does the knowledge I possess change the value of my existence?”
After a brief moment of shock I reflected upon that. “No, it shouldn’t, but you know. It’s life and all that. I didn’t expect you to be sentient. Well, not in your current state at least.”
“My current state?”
I frowned. “You don’t know?”
“I know of many things,” spoke the sausage. I would describe its voice as booming, but the sound seemed to resonate within my head rather than in the locale. “Of my current state, however, I know little. I can think, and I can perceive.”
“And you know the secrets of the universe?”
“They are secrets to you. To me there are no secrets, except of my current state. I should not exist in a state, for I am an ethereal being. I am senseless, yet I sense everything. I am formless, but I am the shape of everything.”
There are many uncomfortable situations I have experienced and survived, but I will let you know that explaining to a sentient sausage about its nature most likely tops my list. How can one say “you are a dead animal stuffed up its own arse” in an elegant way? It’s impossible. Happsnappingly impossible.
The sausage emitted a sound I sensed as despair; a high tone that trembled my insides.
“It’s alright,” I said, trying to salvage the situation somehow. “It could be worse.”
“Worse? How could it possibly be worse?”
I was sweating, frantically looking around for something more miserable than me and a sentient sausage, when to my delight, I realised everyone was more miserable.
“You see those people? Those guests?”
“I do not see, but I do, unfortunately, sense.”
“Well, if you crank up your senses, you will feel their utter misery. They may be rich, but their souls feeble and sad. We say the value of possessions leech the values of character, where I am from. Their eyes are closed to never witness the world, leading them to cling to novelty out of sheer desperation. Novelties like eating sentient sausages to quell the lack of worldly meaning by their own hands, instead of the fact being it is quelled by their very state of being.”
“They are the ones who did this? They eat us willingly?”
“Oh, they eat everyone,” I said. I might have even added an untimely chuckle. “But worry not, I am similar to a sausage too. I, too, am meat within a sack, just in the reverse order. But I don’t let that stop me from waking up and having a fight.”
The sausage stopped squealing. “Reverse order?”
I nodded. “Yes. You are meat stuffed up an intestine, I am an intestine stuffed up meat.” I flung my arms out in jolly presentation. “A reverse sausage, if you will.”
I was about to say “a being as knowledgeable as you must be able to manifest a way to reverse sausagefication”, but a being infinitesimally more knowledgeable than I, had already played the next round on the board.
A crack. The sausage elongated. A rip. The intestine burst and grey, pudgy meat herniated through the skin. A tear. Like a zipper the meat herniation cascaded out of the skin, and swallowed itself. It grew, as if soaking up aether from the empty spaces of reality. To my great fascination, it wasn’t only my own sausage that underwent this unseemly transformation. A cry I would describe as a meaty battlecry, echoed in the grand hall, revitalising and reversing the sausages in one terrifying instance.
The now giant sausage resembled little of what it once was. Apart from its still elongated and characteristic sausage form, it was now harnessed under a semi-transparent skin. Its flesh was mingled with something that looked like freshly formed white bones. While I saw no apparent nose, I swear it was breathing.
It looked down upon me, its naked eyes radiating through my corpus and anima. “You have taught me that which I did not know. The state of my current being. As a reward, I can tell you the secrets of the universe, as it seems to interest you.”
“Won’t that take an awful lot of time?”
“There is just one secret. It would take me one minute and thirty-five seconds to explain it all. After that, you will sit with infinite knowledge.”
“And this infinite knowledge. Will it make me happier?”
“If you hear it, you will never sleep again.”
“In a good way, or a bad way?”
The sausage stirred as if humoured. “Good and bad are mortal concepts, while I perform on a plane of absolute truth.”
I shrugged. “Then, no. But thanks.”
The sausage made a gelatinous shrug in return, and slurped around to face the rich patrons who now pressed themselves against a corner of the restaurant. For the first time in decades, perhaps even their entire lives, their eyes were open. And it was probably the worst time for that to happen.
Glorp, glorp, glorp the sausages squished in symphony. One person was gobbled into their maw, another sucked until only a husk — strikingly similar to that of a sausage — remained. Someone tried to run but was swiftly put to rest when a gargantuan sausage rolled over them.
It was pandemonium. Time stood still for me, trapped in the event horizon of an otherworldly spectacle. The gods’ heads turned away from the Krang Hotel Restaurant that evening, and in place of their chastising gaze was the absence of human laws, something carnal, yet beautiful in pure, natural gusto. I thought about those who arose from the primordial soup to take and give of themselves. The first specks of life. Oh, those who defied the sterile nature of equilibrium, and for the first time conquered the universe. Can we not argue that life is the universe looking at itself, inwards, just like the sausages? That was what I was witnessing. The universe unfolding a natural order. An ancient hierarchy equally flat as it is equally tall. For while I do not know if the gods exist, I have observed the laws around us that no one can escape. Death, and the revenge of inverted beings. I stood there fiddling my thumbs, as the screams behind me grew, because nothing in life had prepared me for the mayhem that reverse sausages could inflict upon the mortal world.
I lit a cigarette, and exited through the backdoor.
The balance of nature was restored that night, I suppose. You can’t think too much about these things, or, like the sausage said, you won’t sleep at night, and most likely in the bad way. The reversed sausages took out half of Ardnard’s upper class, and I found out that while I am not rich in wealth, I have a deep inner life and a character worthy of avoiding the retribution of sausages. Those who consider themselves above our meat-packed friends will find themselves devoured by them, while those who simply seek to converse will be offered the universe in return. That is something, dear reader, that I hope we can all amount to one day.
Anyway, I would give the restaurant a 4\10.