Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)
Prompt:
You’re just living your life. Calling friends, doing your job, getting groceries. Alas, your narrator is unbearably pretentious, and is trying their best to frame this as a deep metaphor for the human condition no matter how much you try to make them stop.
Response:
Ryan Greene tosses another empty milk carton into the yawning, unsatisfied mouth of the trash bin. There’s never enough trash for it, even when it’s near to overflowing. It is glutinous, greedy, hungering for those emptied vessels that have served their purpose – those vessels once filled with that artificially chilled mother-milk of the imprisoned bovines of the planet, which keep the lattes and cappuccinos coming for a stimulant-addicted American people who must have their bitterness tempered with frothed excretion of the slave-cattle’s mammary gla–
“Y’know what?” I told the narrator. “No. Just…seriously. I’m tired tonight. It’s been an eight-hour shift and I had to work the cash through my lunch break because Peter decided to just not show up today.”
Ryan tells himself that he’s enraged at Peter for his absence. In finding fault with the absence, he discovers that he in fact found fault with nothing at all, for the void of that employee’s absence is one of Ryan’s favorite scapegoats. It is always the person not there, the unreturned call, the ghosting on Tinder – always the absence at which he rages, because to place his anger where it might be seen for what it is – where the pale, sunless roots that crawl in the cellar of his soul detect the light that might nourish them at last – would be to face the inevitable growth that would stretch and tear at his sensibilities. Those growing pains would be too great. The animal mind is desperate to avoid them and so i-
“Can you shut-up for a second? I clocked out 15 minutes ago and I’m at FoodSave, for fuck’s sake.” I listened for a moment, pleased that the narrator had indeed fallen silent at my bidding, then went back to staring at the two cereal boxes in my hands. The Brown Sugar Wheat Twists box stated there was 445 grams of cereal inside, and the price was $4.99, but the Honey-Choco Bombs had only 390 grams total, yet the price was $4.49. I tried to do the mental math, but unable to arrive at precise figures, turned the box over to see which one listed the most essential vitamins and minera-
Of course his feet had taken him straight to cereal aisle! For what is cereal without his precious milk? The milk he froths for a living? The pasteurized milk whose vessels he’d tossed into that voracious maw of of the trash bin. It was that milk that his anger had a foundation in, for his whole life he’d been seeking the rich milk from which he’d been weaned so early. It was his anger at being torn away from the nipple – the anger that resides in the heart of all men and women from those moments of earliest childhood when the breast dries and food mash is spooned into their stubborn mouths. Vegetable mash, fruit sludge, WHEAT – devoid of nutrition in comparison to that sublime mother’s milk. Thus they seek out the milk of others! They bend their will to the domestication of cattle, to artificially induced lactation, seeking forever to RECTIFY THAT ABSENCE at which their anger forever boils! That absence of mother’s milk! What wretched, frail creatures are we, sucking on the tits of beasts! What wretch is Ryan, as all his fellows are, who cannot eat his dried wheat without soaking it in that stolen, soulless MILK…!
