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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Poopfood
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I didn’t want to believe it. Like most of us, I was brought up with the idea that there were two kinds of people: those of us who ate food and pooped poop, and those of us who ate poop and pooped food (or at least the basic nutrients and constituents, which could be easily reconstituted into food). It was a complementary system, like so many that nature had inexplicably designed along the way- elegant in its homeostatic simplicity.
But my son was doing research on the internet (God, I remember a time when those two words in the same sentence guaranteed an F) when he stumbled on something, a webpage proclaiming its own odd brand of the truth. At first I wrote it off as conspiratorial nonsense; when he persisted, I disciplined him and sent him to bed. But he hacked my newsfeed the next morning and inserted one of the pages as an update, near enough the top that I hadn’t started my coffee yet. By the time I finished reading it my coffee was cold, and I was running late for work. I’d convinced myself that things with my ex-husband Darren didn’t work because he was an ass (he was); I’d never wanted to admit to myself that he was the safe choice of spouse, that my eye had always wandered somewhere I was told it shouldn’t. I know we’re supposed to call them complex A nutrient excreters, but no one ever had- we called them foodpoopers (which actually is much kinder than what they call us). Scientists had (apparently fraudulently) told us that we’d diverged from a common ancestor at some point, filling different but complementary ecological niches. But this complementarity came at a price: we couldn’t mix. If we did breed, the offspring would be chimeric, unable to completely digest either foodstuff- causing the fetus to die a horrifically agonizing death from malnutrition. But that hadn’t been that much of a problem, since both poopfoods lacked a specific set of vitamins necessary for reproduction- so a tightly-controlled supplement was required to conceive. Still, there was a social stigma- they were still so different, practically another species. Only, it seems, they weren’t; their differences (or maybe ours) were artificial, produced in a lab. A part of me wanted to wallow in shame- I’d been a racist or at least a bit speceist, but I couldn’t care right now- I felt liberated. I’d worked side-by-side with a foodpooper for years, sweet and bright, with creamy skin that distinguished him from complex Bs like me. I’d been staring at him since I got to work eighteen minutes late, just staring, not touching my cold coffee; he knew it, too, and told me it was making him nervous, but I just couldn’t help myself. When he got up to go to the bathroom, I followed, and when he’d turned the corner into the hall I grabbed him and kissed him. His eyes went wide, and for a moment his face was disgust, before his eyes closed and he eased in- and I think I felt his tongue, probing tentatively back. Then he stopped, and said, “I’ve never kissed a poopeater before; you don’t taste bad at all.” I don’t know that it was love at first bite, but I finally knew for certain what I’d been hungry for- even if I was far from sated. |
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