The Forbidden Sandwich
THIS IS A SCRATCH AND SNIFF TEXT. IF THE WORD SEEMS SMELLY, SCRATCH IT! SMELL IT!
Art by Lydia Funk
David and his empty stomach drove their silver hatchback with front wheel-alignment and brake pad issues to his weekly (as well as mandatory) morning nonconformist club meeting that was held at the rec center off Route 27, only five miles away from his home cube, near Mart Mart, the produce-less bodega with the best cat food on a Thursday in the quaint town of Bhuttburg, New England. Although all towns were the same amount of quaint as everywhere else in New England. The pledge David took before each mandatory meeting hummed in the pancake batter space between his ears as he drove southbound on Route 27 before he ate his egg, sausage, and cheese sandwich. He had purchased this morning delight with a $20 bill found in his denim jacket (along with a coiled 10-foot piece of twine for his calico cat Foops and a forgotten stick of ISW raspberry bubblegum) from one of the only fast-food places left called Hunkster’s. It was illegal to eat before these meetings, but David was hungry. He hummed the phrase again but this time aloud. That phrase, coined by the exalted Stevenus Martinius, gonged in his noggin all the time.
I promise to be different!
I promise to be unique!
I promise not to repeat things other people say!
If everyone did the same thing and thought the same thing, then everyone would be the same thing, right? So, no one was different at all, at least in their actions and thoughts. But people were made up of different individual persons, so there must be differences. The oath made no sense! I’m just sleepy, David thought. He remembered asking the visiting Senior Confessor (Senior Confessor Ferp) four years ago in the low-ceilinged foyer of the Student Union Building at Bhuttburg College, who was the senior-level Truth protector for New England, and their position made sure everyone thought the exact same thing at the exact same time and everyone knew SC Ferp was the most important, even though all confessors were equal in the Truth, because they had the longest flowing vestments the color of saffron and the biggest and goofiest hats that looked kinda like giant inflatable penises, not that that shape could be mentioned at all. Pointing out the hat’s dickishness was forbidden. The hat farted out a phantasmagoria of confetti from time to time, to highlight the grandeur of their wisdom. It was a serious position. “Why does my favorite color need to be blue?” David asked as he directed his eyes to the least forbidden place to gaze, the ceiling, which is where, as an English major, he would gaze and ponder about his classes on Flannery O’Connor, Shakespeare, and Kurt Vonnegut, before those courses were labeled forbidden, too, right before physics. David was partial to fuchsia. Foops had a fuchsia collar.
BrRrRrPFFTT!
A phantasmagoria of confetti erupted all around like cherry blossom leaves in Spring.
“Because, David,” the Confessor harked, “it’s everyone’s favorite color. How could it not be—it’s the color blue.” Confessor Ferp laughed and went on about how the circular-ness of this reasoning proved its Truth, as David was showered with more colorful flecks of paper. Ferp pontificated on how years ago, although the exact years are never specified, people believed different things, and everyone wound up murdering everyone else with books and crosses and opinions and stars, so those were outlawed, and everyone agreed on the Truth. Finally, a utopia could flourish without all those violent opinions getting in the way. The End.
The Patron Saint of Seriousness Steve Martin be damned, thought David. Even if it was forbidden to eat before the meetings, David was now 25, and he assumed that if he went and grabbed a sandwich before the meeting then others must have as well—at least that’s what he would say if he got caught, or hopefully something cleverer. David didn’t want to go against the Truth, he just inadvertently did.
David had been living off oatmeal in his two-windowed rental living cube for two months since his bank account was frozen for buying cat food from Mart Mart. He was, along with everyone else, only supposed to buy cat food from the Internet Warehouse Store, but Foops really liked the fish pellets from Mart Mart. There was no real reason why certain stores were okay to buy from and others weren’t. Even the official Truth had instructed the public to purchase pet food from local stores until recently. It always changed, with the it being the Truth, but everyone acted like it had always been the case. Most stores wound up disappearing like their owners.
The part that specifically annoyed David was that Foops wasn’t even his cat—it was his neighbor’s, Sharon’s, that he now had to take care of since she was Rewarded. But David loved Foops. He remembered the exact moment it happened. David saw him swat at a sleepy moonbeam shadow that crept through the only window in his cube in the silliest of ways their first night together a year ago. So, it was okay.
David only had ten more of these meetings until this infraction was erased but it would never be forgotten. Nothing was ever forgotten, it would just be remembered correctly in accordance with the Truth, which was whatever the Truth was in that moment, because the moment was forever and the Truth was forever in that moment, and the reasoning went on like that for a few more paragraphs but all that info sifted like sand through the sieve of his mind even though this axiom was recited every meeting until the Rewards, which felt more like punishments to David, were discussed. The first Reward was freezing the bank accounts, the next Reward was loss of employment; no one worked really, it had been considered forbidden for the last couple years, so all money was deposited into accounts by the government, unless you owned a store but that was becoming rare; most people did nothing but speak the Truth all day in big open meeting spaces that used to be schools, businesses, or places of worship. The third Reward was being catapulted into the Atlantic Ocean from a cedarwood trebuchet off a tugboat named the USS Bippy. It was what had happened to Sharon. She had kept professing a favorability to the color orange, but pets were usually given a second chance, and David was going to get Foops the best food because Foops’ fuzzy cute face deserved it.
All this thought about food made David too hungry to resist his sandwich. With no money coming in he had been forced to eat what he had in his cupboards, and it just so happened to be IWS oatmeal, called Blue Oats, which was delivered once a month in a two-pound recyclable tube per SC mandate, which David was lucky to have, but life was more than grey sludge. Lack of nutrients made him sleep poorly, which made him impulsive.
Each bite of his contraband breakfast sandwich oozed into his mouth like mana from the forbidden notion of Heaven. The rich, dark flavors coated his mouth and hugged his soul. He took his hands off the wheel for a moment to fit a troublesome edge piece into his mouth when the front wheels of his hatchback tilted to the left. Now, David was conflicted by two choices. The first was to drop his glorious breakfast sandwich and have his grey jumpsuit with the label unique to everyone and denim jacket splattered with egg, hot sauce, mayonnaise, sausage, and cheeses. He would be caught and given another Reward, lose his money for good, then who would buy Foops food? On the other hand, if David didn’t grab the wheel, his silver hatchback would careen into oncoming traffic and if he somehow missed all the cars, he’d still dive into the deep green deciduous forbidden forest that flanked the highway. He could die. Or worse, he could still get caught with the illegal sandwich plus the dying. If he didn’t check in for the meeting, a search would commence, and he’d get another Reward for that, too. He imagined Lesser Confessors, these with smaller penis-shaped hats and no farting ability, stomping around his egg-and-sausage-peppered mangled body and making dumb jokes like, “Talk about a bad egg.”
The car was now almost fully beyond rerouting safely onto the highway. In that split-second David forced the entire remaining half of his sandwich into his mouth. For a moment, his life was illuminated. He saw in the rearview mirror that he had the same smile Foops had when he ate his fish pellets. HONK! David careened into the northbound side of traffic. More honks and swears were hurled toward his vehicle but he passed through unscathed. It was a miracle. As he devoured, dragon-like in his chomping, David grabbed the wheel to swerve out of the way of a yield sign and punctured into the forest. He slammed his foot down on the breaks, but the car ignored the request. David regretted not seeing the forest for the trees in many respects, and it was only a matter of time before he crashed. David unrolled the window. Then he placed the sticky raspberry goo on the end piece of the twine.
David kept one hand on the wheel and shimmied his torso out of the car like one-half of a wishbone as he lassoed the gooey twine above his head with his left arm and launched it at a low-lying heft of a maple tree branch. The gooey twine entangled around the branch. David let go of the steering wheel and allowed his home-made liana, now grasped with both hands, to carry him out of his car. He swung up on the branch like he was the hour hand on a clock getting reset from six counterclockwise. It was extraordinarily strong twine. David watched his silver hatchback tunnel deeper and deeper into the forest until it disappeared like a wink. Well, that could have been a lot worse.
Crack! The branch broke, and from four feet off the ground, David plorped back onto the Earth. Everything went black. He hadn’t been knocked out; he had fallen asleep. A sprightly Robin in the tree above chirped, “If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended: that you have but slumbered here, while these visions did appear,” and flapped up toward the morning sun.
Sometime later, David awoke to a blast of confetti. BrRrRrPFFTT! “Confessor Ferp?” David asked in a whisper. Senior Confessor Ferp, along with Lesser Confessors, bobbed around the ruffled forest floor.
“You were a trouble-maker at school, always going on about fuchsia, and you are a troublemaker now,” Confessor Ferp sneered. “Not only did you miss your meeting, but you also ate a sandwich before!” Confessor Ferp bellowed amongst the judgmental hisses of the Lesser Confessors. Confetti farted out of his giant dong-shaped hat. BrRrRrPFFTT!
“You can’t prove I ate a sandwich,” David smirked. He was in the clear; he ate every bite of the egg, sausage, mayonnaise, and cheesy delight. Confessor Ferp pulled out a gold pocket mirror and handed it to David. David investigated the half-dollar sized reflector. Hot sauce and egg were smeared all over his lips, on his cheeks, his nose, and even his forehead above his green eyes. His shaggy brown hair had some cheese glorped in as well.
“See,” Ferp glared the response.
David eked out an answer. “That’s just my face. This is how my face always looks.” More confetti farted out. BrRrRrPFFTT!
“Take him away!” shouted Ferp. David was placed into a large spherical clear rubber ball and bounced away through the foliage by Confessors.
That evening, everyone ten miles offshore aboard the tugboat USS Bippy – besides David and Foops who were latched into the trebuchet – recited the Nonconformist’s Oath:
I promise to be different!
I promise to be unique!
I promise not to repeat things other people say!
David was read a list of charges that started with questioning the favorite color. Boos and hisses erupted from the grey-jumpsuited audience. Next was the improper use of twine and bubblegum in a forbidden forest, then entering a forbidden forest, and also housing a pet that belonged to a former enemy (since starting that day the sins of the owner were now placed upon the pet), the eating of a forbidden sandwich, missing a mandatory nonconformist meeting, and a long list of other crimes which David wasn’t entirely sure he had even committed, but it wasn’t like it mattered now.
Confessor Ferp paused and asked, “Do you repent?”
David was silent. A children’s moon played peek-a-boo behind the only cloud in a cloudless sky. He was about to be launched, with his cat, Foops, into the dark blue ocean. Foops was strapped to his chest, so he kissed his cat’s fuzzy head as Foops twisted that fuzzy face just enough to lick remnant shadows of forbidden sandwich off his owner’s face.