Plastic

I live in a gold house that’s made of plastic, I drive a porcelain car that’s made of plastic, and I kiss my wife’s plastic lips every morning before I go to work.

I used to stick the yolk-extraction-needle into eggs back when the eggs came from real chickens, but that was a long time ago. The yolk would go down one tube and the whites down another. The yolks were cooked in a thumb-thickness tube to make a long, chubby piece of spaghetti. This was then set in a thicker tube and hot yolks were pumped in.

The resulting sausage was transported wrapped in plastic like a piece of deli meat and sliced by the end user. The sliced sausage was a perfect bull’s-eye: a white ring around the edge with an orange centre. A perfect pre-cooked egg, albeit with the texture of plastic.

Nowadays they grow all our protein on oceanic-algal-blooms. There are no more eggs, no more cows, no more pigs. I’m lucky that – having prior experience – I get to operate the sausage extrusion machine. People who don’t have a job, who aren’t useful to society, get plugged into the mainframe. I’m glad to have a use.

The sausages aren’t round anymore. They started making them square because they’re easier to ship. And they don’t look like fried eggs when they’re sliced anymore. They look like green cheese, until you colour them with food dye of course. You can flavour them too. We’ve got pork, bacon, beef, bolognese, stroganoff, chilli cheese… the list is endless.

But, who’s to say that they actually taste like the flavours they represent? It’s been so long since anyone had a slice of real bacon.

I look forward to the end of each day. I like to pull up on my driveway in my porcelain-plastic car, stand under the eaves of my golden-plastic house and kiss the fleshy-plastic lips of my wife. Sometimes she isn’t very happy to see me, but that’s marriage for you! I just reboot her and sit under the plastic tree in the backyard and all is well.

T