Ok, so there were some technical difficulties and the second episode of the race did not air. BUT the first two episodes should be put up online at ictv.org sometime this weekend. For now, here's another writing by yours truly, a short story for my creative writing class:
The Sandwich
It didn’t start like this at all. It started beautifully. A voluptuous woman, a caring mother of three, pieced me together for her youngest son’s lunch. Like Parvathi, wife of Shiva, she molded me out of the most delicious morsels available in her refrigerator. She carefully folded each slice of turkey and ham placing them gently on the first slice of bread. She spread the mustard delicately, giving me some moist, yet tangy sweetness. She evenly sprinkled the onions and lettuce and then she elegantly placed a cold slice of provolone on top. She pressed the two pieces of bread together, and sliced me in half diagonally, making a perfect and painless cut with the precision of a brain surgeon.
I couldn’t have been tastier. She wrapped me in a sandwich bag with her motherly grace and then placed me in the brown paper bag, right between the Cooler Ranch Doritos, a fresh apple, and a chilled Wild Berry Capri Sun. There I sat, waiting.
Understand that, as a sandwich, my life span must be considered relatively. Most sandwiches are made and eaten immediately and have no time to contemplate life before achieving the joy of pleasing someone’s taste buds. Some sandwiches, like me, are made and brown-bagged. Others are made and may live for days without being eaten. The sandwiches I empathize with most are the ones who never get eaten. They never get to know the pure joy a sandwich feels when someone bites into them, squeezing condiments to the side, chewing, enjoying, making that most beautiful sound that leads to pure ecstasy, that “Mmmmm” sound that means one has truly served a purposeful life.
Thus, a sandwich spending six hours in a brown paper bag is probably most equivocal to a human being spending sixty years on a cold, dark, boat, below deck, unable to see out of the ship; only accompanied by a group of complete strangers of totally different species on the long journey towards destiny. Sometimes we hit some rough waters, getting crushed in backpacks, getting tossed into a large plastic bag with dozens of other lunches to be refrigerated in suspended animation until lunchtime. Those in brown paper bags were susceptible to having there hulls breeched and being thrown overboard either to be brutally crushed or to be lost forever. Other lunches are fortunate safely kept in the cold but strong embrace of a lunch box. It’s the difference between getting in a car accident while driving a Pinto and getting in one while driving a Hummer. The brown paper bag doesn’t stand a chance in there.
I made it though. I sat there in a long dormant, meditative state, focusing on my destiny and blocking out the fear of not making it. I admit my chances were pretty good going in because I was near the top of the bag. I felt a quick rush of relief as the bag was thudded onto a table and the mad scramble amongst the children, like a pack of starving, flesh-eating piranhas, ensued. Pushing, shoving, grabbing—it’s a necessary chaos. The child for whom I was created was big and fat, which told me two very good things. First, he’d reach me pretty quickly, dominating his meeker classmates. Second, I would definitely get eaten.
I felt the sharp tug as his sausage-like fingers squeezed around the top of the bag and jerked it airborne. His chubby little legs shuffled as fast as they could to a seat. He plopped down, threw the bag down somewhat roughly, and began to tear in. The bag had been stapled shut at the top so he literally ripped it open.
Let me just take a moment to say how honored I felt to be the sandwich in all of this. As I look back on it, all of my other colleagues from my days in the brown paper bag will never know the rush I know to be the first course in a lunch. Whenever a young child rips open his lunch, the first item he grabs, every time, without fail, is his sandwich. Some kids are a little OCD and lay everything out first and using their brown paper bag as a plate. They neatly lay out their fruit and other snacks, opening their chips and their drink, having everything prepared.
My child was not this cautious. His porcine hands found me and yanked me out. He barely got me all the way out of the plastic bag before he chomped into me not once, but three times quickly. Chomp. Chomp. Chomp! I was already a quarter of the way gone.
Can I rightfully complain? Sure I was being enjoyed, but I felt cheap, like a five-dollar hooker doing pro-bono work. I wasn’t being savored properly. He wasn’t taking the time to taste the delicious organic vegetables his mother put in with an attempt to keep him healthy. With another large bite I was half eaten. It all happened too fast. If he took no time to enjoy me, then how could I take time to enjoy him enjoying me? This little brat was literally ruining my life and all my simplistic goals.
He grabbed at his drink and sucked half of it down. Then he started at the chips. Munching them down, handful at a time, like someone was going to come up and take his food from him if he didn’t eat it all before the criminal arrived. I wished he would trade the other half of me for something, even if it were an unfair trade. As long as someone else, someone other than him would eat and enjoy me. I’d have been traded for a kid’s fruit at this point and not have felt as insignificant as he was making me feel. I could be made of anything, as long as it was edible, and he’d have devoured me just the same. This kid was a garbage disposal, sucking in and annihilating anything within reach of his pudgy arms.
As he yanked me up and started the quick process of inhaling the last of my earthly remains I remember thinking, “If this kid doesn’t slow down he’s going to vomit.”
It’s funny how we foreshadow our own lives sometimes.
The reaction was the norm; he was led to the nurse’s office with dribbles of vomit hanging from his chin. Everyone screamed as soon as it happened and then they all kept an immediate fifteen-foot radius from me. So here I lie, causing anyone who looks at me to become sickened. Everyone who dares take a peak at me gives a look of utter repulsion. I want to cry, but sandwiches don’t have tear ducts, especially not after they’ve been chewed, swallowed, and regurgitated.
Just look at me, a once gorgeous specimen, beautifully conceived by a goddess, now literally chewed up and spit back out by reality. Awaiting the janitor’s arrival, at which point he will humiliate me further, throwing that damn yellow sawdust on me, mopping me up. At least then, it would all be over. I don’t know if I have mentioned it already, but I am a Hindu. I’m not totally sure if being a sandwich was a step up or step back from my last incarnation, but I think I’ve suffered enough to come back as God’s greatest creature, a cow. Then again, knowing my luck, I’ll end up in the slaughterhouse.
