A lot of your quirkier “I fucking love science” types will joke about us human beings as consisting of an intelligent organism, the brain, piloting around the body like some sort of fleshy mech suit. They’ll say that all this clumsy flesh is just a casing for the real life form within, the “man behind the curtain” so to speak. Rykors and kaldanes, y’know? But that’s all bullshit. It’s just a modern retelling of Cartesian dualism, an attempt at devising a secular conception of a soul. There is no meaningful distinction between some abstract, pseudoplatonic “mind” and the sweating, reeking hulks that are our bodies. We’re all just meat in the end, and no amount of philosophizing will ever truly be able to hide this fact.
It all started at a Japanese restaurant. I don’t remember the name of the place, it was a group excursion with friends and I didn’t get to pick where we went. Well, I say friends, but in all truth I don’t think I can even recall the names of the people I went with either, our only real point of connection was through my (former) friend Ted. Most people, I think, don’t actually have the energy to go out and make connections with other human beings, other ambulatory sacks of meat and bone. They get nervous, or overthink things, or are bad at managing time, et cetera, et cetera, an endless parade of excuses to avoid having to deal with the mortifying ordeal of being known. Ted, however, seemed to be able to ingratiate himself with nearly anyone imaginable. I have no idea how he maintained the intricate web of friendships and acquaintances that he possessed, and whenever I spent time with him he seemed to be introducing me to some new person he only met a week ago yet already knows their entire life story. I’d long since come to expect that whenever he asked to hang out, I wouldn’t be the only one attending.
I never really liked Ted much if you couldn’t already tell. He talked too much and too loudly, and never knew when to let a joke die. If there was a contest for beating dead horses, Ted would have won gold medal every time. But, he did possess some sort of natural charisma which caused folks to gravitate towards him, and I never was especially good at making friends, so whenever he sent out an invitation for his little get-togethers I would tag along out of the nagging fear that unless I spent time socializing on a semi-regular basis people might think I was a bit strange. Anything to keep up appearances, after all.
But, that’s not important. I’m rambling, trying to avoid getting to the point of what happened. It feels like maybe if I don’t think about it, if I don’t remember that night at the restaurant, it will have never happened, that maybe if I just go to bed I’ll wake up and everything will be normal again.
Ted was laughing slightly too loud at a joke that one of his new friends had said, and I could feel the prickle of second-hand embarrassment as I watched one of the other guests at the restaurant glance over to our table with a look of slightly detached judgment. My humiliation was cut short, however, when the waiter finally brought around our platter of food.
After a cringe inducing “arigato” escaped from Ted’s beaming, incredibly white mouth, we began divvying up the dishes to their corresponding diners. Usually I was somewhat cowardly when it came to ordering from restaurants, sticking to the beaten path with regards to what foodstuffs I felt comfortable ingesting, but for some Godforsaken reason on that particular day I had decided to be adventurous. I had ordered the sashimi. The plate full of raw fish was placed in front of me, and I gazed upon it with a sort of dull fascination.
I wasn’t disgusted, you must understand, I’m not some squeamish idiot who didn’t know that the raw fish I’d ordered would, indeed, be raw fish, but there was just something so simple about it, so… pure. No other ingredients, no fancy cooking techniques, just clean, uncooked fish, sliced into appealing portions and served with a side of soy sauce. I snapped the binding of the cheap wooden chopsticks before using them to pick up a piece gently, inspecting the sliced tuna for a few seconds as though I were observing some sort of laboratory specimen.
Ted peered up at me from his bowl of ramen with what I assume was meant as a look of encouragement. “Go on Delilah, are you gonna eat it or just look at it?” he asked, playfully.
I was about to respond when the tuna suddenly twitched on the end of my chopsticks. I’m not ashamed to admit that I shrieked as I pulled my hand away in alarm, causing the blob of fish to hit my plate with a meaty smack. Frankly under the circumstances I think it was a perfectly reasonable response.
All eyes turned towards me, and all I could do was point down at my plate, where the dismembered cut of fish was clumsily, blindly undulating towards me, like a slug having an epileptic fit. I was trapped in a booth seat, stuck between two strangers and unable to get out as this limbless blob of disembodied piscine tissue just kept twitching and spasming.
I wasn’t afraid for my life, I think. I don’t believe that I thought I was in any immediate danger, it’s not like the sashimi would be able to do anything. It had no teeth to bite with, no claws with which to cut me. What bothered me was simply that it was moving, and that it should not have been able to move. We don’t expect something which we are going to put into our mouths to still be twitching when we do so. The thought that I had very nearly been about to take a bite made me want to vomit.
Fortunately, my cry of terror had alerted one of the waiters, who, upon noticing the mobile meat, swiftly took the platter away while the rest of Ted’s friends tried their best to calm me down. The man himself, however, was too busy laughing to be of any assistance. He was still guffawing when I managed to extricate myself from the table and make my way back to my car. The moron never did know when to stop turning everything into a goddamn joke.
Now of course after I got home and calmed down a bit with the assistance of some Smirnoff, I took the time to look up what happened on the internet. A quick Google search confirmed that yes, sometimes, very rarely, raw meat can still move around a bit. Something to do with stored energy in the muscles, the cells not being quite yet dead. Fish seem to be particularly susceptible, but it appeared that all sorts of animals did something of a postmortem jig now and again. One particularly nauseating video showed the plucked, headless carcass of a chicken, spasming as though trying to escape as it lay atop a pile of its immobile comrades.
Now, knowing something is natural doesn’t necessarily make it stop being horrific. Understanding how static electricity functions doesn’t make a lightning strike any less shocking, if you’ll pardon the pun. But, at the very least, I was comforted by the knowledge that what I experienced was simply some sort of biological fuckup rather than a sign of the supernatural. At least, that’s what I thought at the time, anyway.
I remember the night after my first experience I had a particularly vivid nightmare. I was standing in the foyer of the Japanese restaurant, and it seemed very busy. A waiter ushered me over to a table, where a number of other people were already seated, including Ted who was guffawing loudly. Laying on the table was a blandly attractive naked woman, her body covered in sushi.
I never really understood the appeal of eating the sushi off of someone’s body, to be entirely honest, even accounting for my own heterosexuality. It’s not as though I’d want to eat off of a handsome man either. There’s something odd, the reduction of a human being into little more than a sexualized table. I mean it’s objectifying, obviously, but I suppose that’s the point, isn’t it? Regardless, I could feel my dream self’s skin crawl as I sat down in my appointed place, knowing that something horrible was about to happen.
As I watched, all of the little slices of fish began to wriggle free from their seaweed binding, squirming and twitching off of the beds of white rice. The woman on the table opened her mouth as the dozens of chunks of ambulatory flesh moved up towards her face. They began to crawl inside, stuffing her open mouth until she couldn’t breath, her face turning blue, but she just kept staying perfectly still, even as her exposed chest heaved up and down, desperately trying to get air into her blocked windpipe. All around me the other guests started to giggle and snicker at the sight, their mirth increasing in intensity as the woman slowly suffocated. When she finally stopped breathing entirely, the whole crowd was engaged in uproarious, hysterical laughter. After a few seconds, the corpse began to twitch and writhe in the same way the dead fish had, its glassy, blank eyes staring out from its lifeless face into nothing. I woke up sobbing.
It was a few weeks before I had my next encounter with unnaturally moving meat. In the intervening time I tried very hard to forget the whole matter, though I did make an effort to avoid Ted, social conformity be damned. Whenever I thought about his stupid laugh it made me feel sick all over again. As a matter of fact I spent a lot of time avoiding everyone, really. I prefer solitude, especially when after I’ve undergone something upsetting. It may seem silly that I’d go to all this fuss over a single piece of twitching sashimi, but I’ve always been fairly sensitive, and something about the whole concept of dead tissue still being able to move bothered me beyond belief. Maybe I just watched too many zombie films when I was a kid or something, who knows?
In any event, the second time happened at a company barbecue. Mandatory attendance, of course, it was that sort of a workplace, all focused on teamwork and working together “not just as a business, but as a family.” I don’t exactly know why I needed to be so focused on forming a bond with my coworkers when my own position as a data entry clerk left me working in blissful isolation for most of the time, but I imagine the overpaid men in suits who arranged these corporate equivalents of elementary school pizza parties instead of just giving out raises probably didn’t understand the concept of introversion. Anything to force employees back to the office after years of working from home, I suppose.
Fortunately I didn’t need to drive to the event, as it was just held in the parking lot during lunch hour, which I ordinarily spend sitting in my car curled up with a book (I could never stand the constant chatter of my coworkers in the break room). Like most corporate teamwork building events, it was simultaneously deeply awkward and a little bit sad. A few grills were set up with some bored looking catering staff cooking up burgers and steaks, while the halting half-laughter and polite tones of corporate enforced camaraderie emanated from the office drones clad in blandly professional outfits as they sat at the various card tables set up under white plastic tents.
I held out a paper plate like a priest soliciting donations from his congregation, and one of the underpaid pitmasters plopped a well-done steak onto it. I slathered it with a generous helping of barbecue sauce and then sat as far away from everyone else as I possibly could. Just because the powers that be could force me into attending this little gathering didn’t mean they could make me talk to anyone.
I sat glumly, stewing in my own petulance (I’m nothing if not self-aware) as I cut a piece off of my steak and popped it into my mouth without really looking at what I was doing. The texture was… off, somehow, and the flavor was unusual. I looked down at the steak to see that beneath the crispy, almost burnt exterior, the meat was quite rare, undercooked even, and was leaking blood onto my paper plate. It was thick too, not the watered down juices from a rare steak, but sticky, opaque, red as a bullfighter’s cape. Then, the hunk of charred flesh lunged towards me.
I don’t mean it twitched, I don’t mean it crawled, the thing leapt like a goddamned jackrabbit right at me. I fell backward in the cheap plastic folding chair, banging the back of my head against the concrete in the process which caused my vision to be filled with stars. I could feel the sticky, greasy piece of meat slithering across my chest, moving towards my open mouth, and I screamed in terror and pain. I could feel it pulsing as though it had a heartbeat, and the warmth from the grill made it feel sickeningly close to body heat.
It was only a few seconds before some of my coworkers rushed over to help, but it felt like an agonizingly long time as I lay there in pain, the quivering hunk of burnt flesh squirming closer to my face. Finally, someone helped me to my feet, and as though shy in the presence of other people, the steak seemingly lost its capacity for movement, falling to the ground with a wet splat.
Everyone wanted to know what happened, they kept asking me over and over again:
“Are you okay?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Are you hurt?”
The whole time I couldn’t focus on what they were saying for long enough to give a satisfying answer, I’d just see their red, fleshy tongues flapping in their mouths and feel sick all over again, feeling painfully aware of the blood that the steak had leaked all over my dress. They’re all just mounds of walking, talking, meat, covered in a thin layer of greasy, stinking skin and wrapped up in cloth to hide the truth of what they are. What we all are.
I managed to eventually stammer out some sort of excuse that my manager accepted as reason for me to take the rest of the day off, and I drove home after I calmed down enough to feel safe at the wheel. I didn’t tell anyone about the moving steak. I knew they wouldn’t believe me. It’s not like anyone else saw it that time.
When I got home I threw out all the meat in my refrigerator. Starving children in the third world be damned, I wasn’t going to risk having the fucking bologna try and smother me in my sleep. Call me paranoid if you want, but after what I’ve been through, I feel pretty goddamn vindicated. It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you after all.
See, it didn’t stop with the steak. Even after I cut all meat out of my diet (I pretended it was a health thing), I still wasn’t free from dead flesh moving. It was little things at first. Dead flies on the windowsill twitching tiny legs previously held stiff with rigor mortis. Soggy worms that were still just moments before struggling to escape their watery tombs as I pass them by on the rain-soaked sidewalk. Hell, maybe it had been going on a while even before the sashimi incident and I just never noticed. But once I had an eye for it, it seemed to happen everywhere.
I knew it wasn’t natural. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, dozens and dozens of times afterwards over and over until you feel like clawing your fucking eyes out rather than see another roadkill squirrel try to drag itself across the pavement towards you is a sign that God just hates you. I can’t even walk into grocery stores anymore, I have to get everything by delivery, because if I even get within a hundred yards of the meat department I might see the sausages and chicken breasts and steaks and pork chops and dozens of other plastic wrapped corpses gently flopping and spasming and twitching, trying desperately to break free of their refrigerated prisons to get towards me. I know I’m not just going crazy. Usually, nobody notices, the meat quieting as soon as anyone else is around, but not always. I remember once watching a young girl start crying as she saw a T-bone steak crawling like an inchworm behind the glass case of the meat counter. She asked her mother why it wasn’t dead. Meat asking the meat it budded off from why the meat which should be still is moving.
Who are you supposed to talk to about this sort of thing? Where were you supposed to go? It’s not like a shrink would do me any good as I am in no respect delusional, and I certainly was not going to try and seek out the assistance of a priest. If anything the moving meat has more firmly cemented my disenchantment with the prospect of divinity; any God that allows such violations of nature to exist is not one who is worthy of worship. I wasn’t going to beg on my hands and knees for the help of a deity who presides over a broken world.
So I just dealt with it. I kept away from grocery stores and supermarkets, I turned a blind eye to the twitching bugs and spasming roadkill, and I stuck to my new vegetarian diet. I also had to remove all the mirrors in my house. I couldn’t bear to look at my reflection anymore, to be reminded of the meat that is me. Every twitch of an eye, every deep breath, it all just felt like that same unnatural mobility of dead flesh. Go ahead and call it denial if you want, my disposal of the mirrors, but it gave me at least some peace of mind. Besides, I didn’t like looking at the bags under my eyes that I was getting from all the nightmares.
This continued for a while, my coping with the impossible by simply ignoring it. Maybe a month or two, though it is hard for me to remember exactly how long. Things weren’t perfect, I drank a lot and had a few breakdowns here and there, but who wouldn’t under the circumstances? My point is I was getting on with things, to the best of my ability, and not just crumbling from the pressure. I wasn’t going to be beaten by a bunch of lifeless tissue being puppeted around by some unknowable force. I’m stronger than that.
Then came my father’s sickness. It happens to everyone in the end, doesn’t it? Meat spoils, after all. I don’t remember all the details, the doctors used a lot of fancy sounding medical terminology for it, something about blood clots and brain damage, but what it all boiled down to is that the man who raised me was on his deathbed, unconscious and unresponsive.
I never knew my mother. She ran off at some point shortly after I was born, leaving daddy dearest to take care of me the best he could. And he did do his best, I’m sure of that now. He fucked up along the way, but everyone’s parents do. They’re not perfect. Nobody is perfect. We’re all just meat, after all.
I started spending a lot of time with my father. He spent so much of his life caring for me when I had just entered this world, I felt like it was only fair I was by his side as he left it. I wasn’t deluded into thinking that he’d get better, or even that he would be aware of my presence, but it felt right for me to be next to him. I didn’t want him to die alone.
I’d sit there by his side, reading from one of my books. Sometimes, if the mood struck me, I’d read aloud to him. There was never any recognition in his eyes, he’d just stare blankly at the ceiling, his rattling breathing providing a distant background hum, but I didn’t mind. If anything I kind of appreciated that he didn’t do much. I was so used to things that shouldn’t move moving that it almost felt like a relief to see something which should move remain more or less stationary.
Now, they didn’t have him hooked up to life support machines or anything like that, you must understand. Nothing to monitor his vital signs, no machine to keep his heart beating, he was just laying in bed under scratchy hospital blankets. My father wasn’t afraid of death, and had demanded that he not be resuscitated in the event of something like this happening to him. Better to die with dignity than be forced to live with the help of machines.
It was because of this lack of monitoring that I didn’t initially notice when he finally stopped breathing. I was just sitting there, reading, when all of a sudden I was struck by how quiet the hospital room was. I put down my book and looked over to the bed, and my father’s chest had ceased to rise and fall. He was gone, and I hadn’t even realized when it happened. I knew it was coming, but I wanted to be there for him, I wanted to hold his hand as he crossed that final threshold. That this was taken from me made me start to cry.
I grabbed hold of his hand, hoping to experience at least my father’s warmth for one last time before he went cold. There was still the faintest touch of heat in his calloused, old fingers, and the tears flowed freely down my face.
“I’m sorry”, I said as I squeezed his hand, “I’m so sorry dad.”
He squeezed back.
Gasping in surprise, I looked up, hoping against all hope to see my father’s smiling face as he woke up, as if from a long dream, miraculously alive and okay. But that isn’t what I saw. This isn’t that kind of story. This isn’t that sort of world.
The corpse that was my father began to twitch and spasm, writhing and squirming as if made of a hundred tiny pieces each trying to break free from the whole. What was once my father’s head rolled lazily to face me, doll eyes blankly staring forward as the lifeless thing wriggled towards me.
It was like watching an octopus move, each limb in possession of a mind of its own, its hand in a vice grip against mine. I tried to pull free but I couldn’t, it was grasping too tight. I screamed for help, calling for anybody to get this corpse, this meat, away from me. My cries were cut off as its other hand grasped my throat, bent awkwardly at an impossible angle as I heard its bones snap.
My vision faded to black, and the last thing I saw before I passed out was my father’s face, lifeless and dead, staring into nothing.
I lived, of course. I wouldn’t be sitting here typing this if I didn’t. Whatever unnatural force was animating the corpse, it didn’t stick around long enough to do any lasting damage beyond leaving some bruises on my neck. A nurse found me unconscious on the floor, my father’s body laying on top of me stiffly.
They didn’t even try to come up with a realistic explanation for what happened, they just said my injuries must have been self-inflicted during a “psychotic break brought about by the traumatic event”, because no doctor is going to believe a woman who says her dead father tried to strangle her to death. The most they humored me was admitting that it was possible that I witnessed some postmortem muscle spasms. Meat that didn’t know it was dead yet.
I’m working through it though. I’m facing my fears. That’s what you’re supposed to do as an adult right? You just sit down and deal with things, you don’t make a fuss about it. And so that’s what I’m doing, I’m handling all this with maturity and grace.
I’ve even started eating meat again.
Little pieces.
Nice, bite sized chunks.
I’ve almost gotten used to how it feels as it wriggles down my throat.