To Eat a Peanut

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To eat or not to eat? That is the question.

It’s not a hard question.

The Answer is Yes.

But how will the peanut feel?

Perry the Peanut stared into the yawning abyss before him. The massive, pudgy fingers that clutched him in its grasp held him teeter-tottering at its rim.

Had he come all this way, from the foundling fields of his legumic youth, only to meet his end here? He could scarcely recall home anymore. He could barely remember his brothers and sisters of the soil, that he had lost in the current of a sea of peanuts that trundled through industrial chutes and iron drum vats. He’d beheld the horrors of the Machine that had stolen him from his home (a home that was but another deception of the Machine, a farm of mass-slavery) and packaged him into vacuum-tight plastic bags. He had crisscrossed the world on trucks, ships and planes. He’d witnessed the dark nights and darker frights, as the peanuts squished around him in that nightmarish bag begged and cried out for freedom, in this life or the next. Then in the light again he was, sitting upon shelves and shelves of peanut bags, and those monsters of the Machine walking to and fro, snatching them down one by one. And now he had reached his end - on foreign soil, held by foreign fingers, before a foreign cavern wider than his very comprehension.

He stared into the abyss, and the abyss stared back. He could see pearly white teeth (teeth!), glistening with spittle and crawling with multitudes of squirming, worming bacteria. He could see a slithering, quivering tongue, pink and full of pustules, lying in wait for poor souls to constrict. He could see saliva pooling in crevices and orifices, squirting out of alien tubes, in mechanical preparation to drown him. And he could see a tunnel - a deep, deep, deep tunnel that went down and down into the depths of the earth, deeper than the roots of his home had ever delved and darker than the nightmares of the factory.

It was Doom. This was his Doom.

The pudgy fingers released him. Cold air parted before him as he fell. Perry felt the air of freedom for the last time in his life.

The tongue was wet. He landed upon it as massive jaws snapped shut, snipping off the last light he would ever see. The tongue twitched at Perry’s landing and immediately it curled around him, smothered him, tightened its grip. Saliva poured over him, a billion needles stabbing into his skin. But he was tough - he would not go without a fight.

Then the tongue let go and tossed him up, and the teeth - those pearly whites - grabbed him. Nausea bounced around within Perry’s nutty soul. What he saw now was yet another Machine - but a biological one. Everything had its place - the saliva, the tongue, the teeth, the tunnel - but they were all alive. What were they all for? What were they doing to him?

And it was only then that he realised that those jaws were pressing down on him.

The teeth were squeezing him! Perry fought against the strain. Acid burned down his face. The teeth squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. He could feel it - his insides slipping, his skin cracking, the teeth breaking him open-

CRACK!!

Perry fell back onto the tongue. Perry fell into the pools of saliva. Perry clung to the teeth’s crowns. Perry was everywhere and nowhere. He was in pieces.

But the teeth were not done. Crack! Crack! Crack! they went, crushing him into tinier and tinier shards. Now he was dissolving into the saliva, joining the liquid acid and mixing into a molten mush.

Perry’s mind turned to his brothers and sisters, how they grew together and sang songs of a wilder, untamed life. He recalled the comforts of the soil, how it calmed and comforted him on rainy days and dark nights. He remembered it all…

And then he remembered nothing.

Finally the tongue gathered all of him up and gently rolled him into a ball. What sordid, useless endeavour this was, to slice him into a billion pieces before putting him back together as a monstrous amalgam. The tongue gave a push, and he tumbled…

Into that deep, deep tunnel.

Down and down he went. He could feel nothing and everything. He was no more, and yet his journey was only beginning. Where would he go now, and what would he become?

To be continued in Issue #501: To Digest a Peanut (only $999)

Featuring Ed the E. coli