Famine

by George Oliver

You mindlessly refresh emails as day gives way to night, an impromptu growl communicating that your stomach needs filling, an instinctual lick of the upper lip confirming that a layer of saliva had begun to decorate it. You set the table in your head: knife, fork, 26 lb of leg, 10 lb of human head (severed). Externally, you fight the unabating urge, repackaging and conveying the figment of imagination as a less socially repulsive, more convincingly "human" formulation: Jeanine, shall we order takeaway?

Jeanine returns the serve begrudgingly, spouting something about having already eaten, about how Alana you are always hungry, about the importance of dietary regulation and routine, about Health and basic looking-after-oneself-ness being the paramount cause of this pandemic in the first place.

You ignore her outburst, visualising her index fingers dipped in a side pot of humous. You imagine responding with something ambitious (pretentious) about Health being a market construct, but don't. You consider offering something vaguely (uninformatively) critical of China, but don't.

You resort to writing, directing, and starring in a hypothetical three-picture deal with connective tissue of expensive, visually effected human entrails... and a sustained narrative preoccupation with anatomical dissemblance method. You shoot on 16mm and conclude the trilogy by identifying the best spices to coat the kidneys in prior to consumption. This is all before Jeanine notices the concentration lapse and snaps you back to your comparably deficient reality: notbeing able to leave the house, notbeing able to slice up your girlfriend and fry her in some vegetable oil.
When a conversation between the two of you does materialise, it comes thick and fast, seeping through the cracks in the walls and filling the sitting room of your apartment. Your modest two-bed in an unsightly, brutalist condominium, marring the otherwise quaint neighbourhood, dispelling its potential for serenity in a society predicated on hysteria.

'All this negativity, Jeanine, is not helping anything right now.'

'Well, Alana, why don't you just kill me?'

'I don't know the combination of the larder.'

'It is not the intensity but the duration of pain that breaks the will to resist.'

'Would you look at that... less than a fortnight locked in and we don't even speak the same language anymore.'

None of the above prevail, so later that night you pursue the suggestive story avenue you first entertained the possibility of: Jeanine on a spit, dressed in marinade, with a sprinkle of salt, two of black pepper, and a handful of parmesan. The course of action puts ends to the respective problems of competitive grocery shopping (in the arena of depleting supermarket shelves), pangs of social anxiety at the prospectof leaving your house (and being contaminated by the infected air of global crisis), an uncertain economic future for your dwindling career as a self-starter (navigating the choppy waters of freelance work). Divided into meal sized portions, ingested with restraint and self-discipline, Jeanine is your answer to everything.