Arberson's Plight

"Don't eat me!"

"Oh, I'll eat you. I'll hunt you down with my fork and eat you, you elusive little bastard!"

"DON'T EAT ME!"

Arberson’s plate was empty; the broccoli had fled north, past his glass of milk. His carrots had rolled off the plate and were right now hiding in the space between the edge of the plate and the table. His South American pork chop, shrieking like the pig from which it originated, had just jumped off the table, heading for the door. The dog hatch, to be specific, where Arberson's food had, as always, been delivered. Pork chops, famously missing an opposable thumb, a hand, extremities in general and any other tool needed to open a standard size human door, could only jump. And so, the dog hatch was its only hope.

It was crying. Arberson could hear it wailing; "No thumbs, no legs, only tiny bounces for Señor Pork El Chop!"

A shout suddenly pierced the lunchtime air: "Aaaah!"

It was the pickle. In an attempt to save its beloved carrot children, it went for Arberson’s throat. Jumping off the table, landing on the human executioner’s well-worn shirt, it went on to ascend slowly by jumping from button to button. Arberson, sensing the plan of the devious preserve, grabbed his fork and went for it. He was now involved in a life or death situation. It was the pickle, or him.

"You came for my mother, conserved one, but you're not going to get me!" Arberson cried out.

"Leave my children alone, Human! The love me and Babette Broccoli have for our carotaceous offspring transcends the bipedal understanding of passion!"

But Arberson managed to stab the former cucumber in the heart with his fork, plunging the fork through its brittle, wet body and into his own. Through his shirt, into his own flesh. But he experienced no pain, only a strange satisfaction. What a fitting end, he thought, that they would both be stabbed by the very agent of the enemy’s demise! Not a blood pact, but a blood triumph.

"Now, where are those baby carrots," he cried out in victory as he chewed the orange ones' father to death. "I will have you!"

The broccoli, now hiding behind a white plastic bottle with a large label reading "WARNING: DOPAMINERGIC MEDICATIONS", was now experiencing an adrenaline rush the kind a bouquet of broccoli would normally never experience in a field. Where their husband had failed, they would now have to succeed. They had to, no other option existed in their world. Their babies were in danger.

Arberson could feel their anguish. It was a sweet, sweet condiment to an otherwise tasteless dinner. Panic. Fear. Anxiety.

It was just as when he was young, playing video games as a ninja, slashing fruits and vegetables. He would always get them all. From morning, when mum went to work, to evening when she got home. Zombie-plants, vegetable tales, all with satisfying animations and backstories. And, sometimes, when mum had time to play with him after work, the satisfying chef-experience of his favourite multiplayer game, Overcooked. They had been his friends in an otherwise lonely world. And now, three days after his 85th birthday, a lifetime later, as he sat locked up in a senior residence camp, they had returned for him. Nightmares, sourced from recollections of his adolescent crimes. Memories of heinous deeds to virtual veggies.

He had never meant to hurt any real vegetables. They were all just games.

Until now.

"Pork Shop! You owe us, you know that you owe us!" The broccoli squealed. Halfway through the dog hatch, the chop stopped. Arberson could see it thinking, its meaty sense of moral overtaking it. A mistaken devotion, the meek personality trait of a would-be porcelain hero. It would be its final mistake, a fatal one.

It dropped on the floor, and slowly turned around. Sweat was dripping off its perfectly caramelized, crispy surface, carrying the pepper and thyme. Anger, and duty, painting it black. "OK, old man. This has gone on for too long. You ate my brothers and my sisters. You tore down my world, bled our god Sæhrímnir into non-existence, and forced me into this nightmare. This is it, if I am to go to the compost of the Valhalla, I'm taking you with me!"

“I thought you were Latin American, Señor El Chop!?” The master of the meal uttered in international shock. “It says so on the packaging!”

“The boar god of Æsir knows no nationality and cares not for your ignorance! We, the fruit of his loins, fears no fork, for every night we are born again!”

Arberson watched in shock as the pork chop started its arduous trek back over the module's floor. With only one room within which to exist, Arberson had nowhere to hide. But, that was never his intention. He had beaten these things in his gaming youth, he would take them on in his desolate senior years. He had no katana to wield, no butchers knife to chop the chop. Only his cutlery, and a will to live.

"Bring it, señor El Chop!" he called out as he turned from the table to the floor. A lifetime of practice had left him alone and miserable, until this very moment. Endorphins and oxytocin coursing through his body, there would be no breakfast when tomorrow dawned. He braced himself for the impact of the enemies advanced. It would not be pretty.

"Hiyaa!" howled his adversary as it used its last of its meat juices to jump up onto Arberson's lap.

"Choke on this!" the old dinner-party-of-one consumer hollered as he went at the cutlet with his left-hand fork. But, the porky antagonist dodged him, lodging the ill-aimed plastic trident into its wielders own left thigh. Screaming in pain, he missed the main course jumping up his right arm, going for the shoulder.

Babette Broccoli had, at his point, managed to get all their carrots into safety behind a pitcher of cold, bovine fluids. One by one, they were rolling off the table. Heading for the hatch in the door where their protagonist had previously found his courage.

With a holler, Arberson went for the headless Argentinian chow sitting on his shoulder, but missed. The piece of meat dodged the fork, like a matador of yore, and began its ultimate climb up the neck of his captor. This was it, the tiny schweinekotelett thought. The tapestry of his texture meant nothing now, the end would come for either him, or his consumer. Reaching the unshaved chin, he experienced a sensation of existential freedom: nothing could savour him now.

"We made it, we are out," he could hear the broccoli shout, but it meant nothing now. He had fulfilled his duty. Now, he would fulfil his destiny.

"God damn your kind!" The chop growled as it braced for its final push. Almost torn apart from the effort, it forced itself into the mouth of its tired nemesis. He had begun to dry out, the salt of the monster's sweat penetrating his own nutritious crust, but it mattered not. Nothing did—now.

This was it.

Arberson stabbed himself in the face with both fork and knife as he, in panic, tried to avoid the inevitable. The chop, now lodged firmly down his throat. Anguish, but ever without purpose. A reel of video games and virtual reality settings played in front of his eyes as he failed to acquire that vital air he had always taken for granted.

Albion Jacob Arberson’s dead head hit the empty plate with a large pounce, where his lunch was supposed to reside. His arms fell down his side, and from within him, vengeance drew its last breath. Not a pork chop, not a friend of vegetables or enemy of its god, but a hero, through and through. A purpose, never previously yearned for, brought the sweet, juicy champion to rest.

As hours passed, emptiness turned to eternity, silence into a quiet noise.

Comments, from the inevitable caretakers, formed a background noise, bothering none of the previously involved parties. They found, by the table of their ward, parts of his dinner thrown around the module. Nothing new, nothing unexpected. These anonymous employees had seen this before. Placing Arberson's aged body on a gurney, covering it with a white sheet, they didn't even bother to clean his face up from the blood and broth with which it was covered.

It was, as it always was, what they wrote on the tag on his toe: "Old age."