1000 WAYS TO PREPARE ‘IT’
Shmo or Joe, I don’t know, liked to torment his mother. So every day he’d ask her, “What’s for dinner, Ma?”
“You know darn well what we’re having. It!”
“Not ‘it’ again!”
It was it. All that was left. In the old days, there were plants and animals of various persuasions. Before the U.S. of Assholes’ Frankengenes escaped. Slowly one plant gene took over the whole green kingdom. Happened so long ago, we don’t even know what It was. It’s just called ‘it.’
After a while, all the things that ate other things died off. And the things that ate them died off. So now it was down to People, and It. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.
Can’t say what It tasted like, because it’s been just It for so long, there’s nothing to compare It to. The two jokes left from the old days are It tastes just like chicken and It tastes like republicans.
People wove clothes out of It. Processed It in various ways to make bowls, spoons, condoms. Life was bleak.
But there was hope. There were rumors of a new book, 1000 Ways to Prepare It.
Mutant gypsies from the east had it, the book. Trouble is, there was no way to buy it because there was nothing but It to trade for it. It was written in ink made from It, on paper made from It, bound in cardboard made from It. But it did exist. It was true.
Some of the book’s secrets were the use of special spices. If you took human shit and dried it for one year in the sun and mixed it with water, and then evaporated that water, you had a Spice, a flavoring spice. A second spice involved a lengthy process with human urine. Another condiment was a tubercle thick phlegm from dying babies, harvested and dried at just the right time. Menses blood could also be used.
The trick of all this was It tasted so bad, even though nobody had anything to compare It with, that piss and shit and phlegm and menstrual blood were actually steps UP the taste chain. A few folks had tried cannibalism to get away from It. Unfortunately, humans have been eating It so long, they tasted like It. So that practice died out. Besides, the meat would rot and smell and decay, and then you’d have bad smelling It.
For a while there, before cars disappeared, there was a bumper sticker that said, It happened.
But if you had the book, and you bought the spices, and you didn’t know where the spices came from, there was hope because the book showed you different ways to grind, process, coagulate, curdle, blend and whip It. That, added with the various shit piss phlegm menstruum spices gave you quite a range of tastes and textures. Mucous snot was also highly sought after for a custard-like It pudding, for dessert.
There were also various minerals used for flavoring, like sea salt. And ground calcium from the bone yards. And dandruff flakes. All mentioned in the book.
These traveling mutant gypsies would crawl from town to town, set up big It fairs. Fix ten, fifteen kinds of It. Give It to the crowd in sample packets. Then sell the book.
Unfortunately, the only compensation they would take were babies less than a year old, used foreskins, internal organs and left testicles. These were all ground up for various spices. And of course the baby skins were also used for deluxe editions of the book.
A great but rare delicacy was frozen It. But because of the weird world weather resulting from global swarming, you never knew when this product was available. And for the less adventurous, there was pre-chewed It.
If It were grown in excessively hot, humid climates, It could be dried and smoked as a psychotropic. People would sit around and take a toke and say, Wow. Good It.
There were profits and foreseers and current way naysayers all saying It wasn’t always this way. It didn’t have to be this way. It won’t always be this way. But this It was the It it is. Although, there was a seed of truth in their prophesies. For It was dying.
Frankengenes have no lateral movement ability. They’re cut and dried. By taking over the Earth, they had changed the balance just enough that the Earth was moving outside their parameters. So It was slowly dying. Soon there’d be just humans. No animals, no birds, no fish, no plants. No movement in the sea. Just people. Which brings to mind that old Twilight Zone story, To Serve Man.
But until then, you could get a slight variety of taste by harvesting It at different times. Early It looked like a bad cross between a sick fungus and dog poo. Intermediate It resembled giant rose thorns. Mature It looked like sunshine reflecting on flowing water. Gorgeous. Old It looked like bad wrinkles on an off day.
It wasn’t always this way. Originally, It was the best of wheat, rice, oak and barley. It was a gorgeous plant. Danced in the sun. Played in the rain. Every part was edible: seeds, sap, leaves, stems, flowers, pollen, stalks, roots. All could be cooked or eaten raw, woven into clothes, processed into ecologically-friendly pseudo plastic that degraded within weeks. But everything changes. That’s the law of Darwin.
Plus, It was created by greedy, impatient Republican scientists who didn’t properly tie all their gene nodes down. There’s always the inevitable going awry-ness associated with any new technology. Man first makes, then tests. Then corrects. Well, It didn’t wait for correction. It just took over. Left no room for biodiversity. Mutated into its own madness. Castrated the food chain.
The first to go were butterflies. Fish soon followed. The flesh of mammals shrank, and what little was left tasted sour. Dust mites died. The resulting buildup of dust killed off the plankton. Once the plankton went, it was over.
Initially, It met all the nutritional requirements for humans. But as It mutated, people began changing as well. Eyebrows and ear hair grew excessively. Flesh withered. Skin turned sallow and hung. Wrinkles everywhere. Which caused sexual problems because folks became too ugly to have sex in light, so resorted to darkness, which resulted in frequent wrinkle intercourse rather than procreation. Sweat pooled beneath the wrinkles, so it was hard to be sure which wet place you were in.
Some folks blamed all this on Clara Bow, the old time movie star, because she was known as the It Girl. But it really started with a prophetic movie from the fifties, titled, It Conquered the World.
The fact that It was dying out, leaving only humans, isn’t totally true. Because it was hard to tell the difference between old It and wrinkled human. In fact, sometimes if you had too much fermented It in a bar, you couldn’t be sure if you’d wake up with a human or an old It. There was so much Human-It sex going on, that you would never know what was going to be born. Folks frequently ate their offspring and married off their produce.
So it was a strange blending of It-Human Human-It slowly eating each other, fertilizing each other, loving each other. And the Earth became wrinkled.
– Kathy Ireland Smith & Steven B. Smith, January 16, 2007
