23 March 2012
Roger was consuming a hamburger for dinner when he heard on the evening news that much of the beef sold in supermarkets was supplemented by meat byproducts sterilized by ammonia, making an additive substance that was called, "pink slime."
"Appetizing thought, isn't it?," Roger asked his cat, Axel, who regarded him curiously. "If you are what you eat, Axel, I'm in bloody big trouble!," remarked Roger as he considered all of the food additives and preservatives that he had ingested over many years. The cat mewed in agreement, but continued to love Roger anyways.
"And to think, Axel, that I eat minced fish and boneless chicken as well! Have you ever seen a 'minced fish?' And wouldn't a 'boneless chicken' be a sorry creature? How could it move, for Christ's sake?!" Axel was unable to come up with an answer.
Roger laughed at the thought of boneless chickens oozing over the landscape as he extended his arm and gazed at it, pondering all of the unnatural things that he had put into his body over many years. As he stared at his arm, he noticed that his skin had seemed to have become pale and transparent, and that his human flesh had become a kind of cytoplasm flowing within that see-through skin.
Roger turned his arm over and stretched his fingers out, but they and the hand and arm that they were attached to continued to extend to impossible lengths. "My God!," realized Roger, "I'm becoming an amoeba-like creature! The pink slime, the years of food additives have radically re-written my DNA!--I HATE it when that happens!"
Axel hissed at Roger as his once human owner flowed from his chair and around the apartment he occupied, extending pseudopods for locomotion. Mitochondria and other new structures floated inside Roger's cellular membrane where until recently there had been a heart, liver, and other organs.
A knock then came to his door. Roger extended a pseudopod from his irregularly-shaped body, wrapped it around the doorknob, and exerted downward motion to open the door. There standing at the door portal was a magazine salesman, who looked at the gelatinous blob that Roger had become and screamed. Roger responded by rearing up and enveloping the salesman, stopping the nasty noise and beginning thereafter the process of digesting him. He never had cared much for salesmen, and liked screechy loud noises even less. Axel the cat observed his strangely changed master intently, being somewhat of an ambush predator himself...
Pink Slime • Opuss № I