Microwave Dinner

The old TV flickered, the colors melding, shifting, forming images. The speakers on its sides made sounds. The old box television shuddered as it made noises, the antenna on the top flickering ever so slightly. It was brown and wooden, the sounds were coming from a set of speakers laid into the box on each side, holes peeking out, latticed, a hive of symphony.

He barely tasted the meat as he moved the fork into his mouth, closed his teeth around it, and pulled the fork out in one swift, flawless motion. If he had, he would not have tasted it anyways. It was a microwave dinner, meant for people like him, marketed to them as something for ‘busy people’, as if being too busy to taste food was a good thing. It was made for people like him, people who would sit in front of their televisions after their mindless jobs, mindlessly chew on food with no taste or substance, and people who would soak in television programming like it was substance for their souls - more often than not, it was not.

The television turned black, and then white, a high pitched sound punctured the otherwise silent night briefly. Then it was gone. The programming returned. He kept watching.

Kept chewing. Each bite was an exercise in munching, the bits of meat, soft, too soft to be real meat, crumbling into tinier pieces in his mouth, his teeth doing work that was easier than what they were meant to do. Than what they had evolved to do.

His favorite mindless show ended, he looked slowly down at his food, he was full, but it seemed like such a waste to, well, let it go to waste. He changed channels. News was always easy, always talking about the weather. Always talking about unimportant things. They had seemed important once… but he had become attuned to them. He supposed everyone did. They got used to them. It was easy to imagine that all the earthquakes and disasters and tragedies struck far away, not here, not in the greatest country on the planet. All the dictators and terrorists, all of them were far away. Nothing happened in his country, state, or town. They were shielded.

He kept slowly putting bites of food into his mouth, mindlessly chewing, automatically swallowing. His stomach grumbled, uncomfortable. He ignored it, that had become habit. It had become habit as his shirts had started to become tighter, stretching over folds of skin that had become more voluminous, multiplied in number over the course of many years. Life was good, life was easy. He had everything he wanted, and more. Food was abundant. He had become complacent, he had become obese. But hadn’t everyone. People he had worked with for years were mirror reflections of him. All obese. All self-satisfied.

The antenna flickered, straining for signal. The screen blurred, and returned.

He kept putting food in his mouth as he watched the news.

The screen showed a child, representative of his community, starving in some far-off country that was not really that far off. Skin straining as it tried to stretch over bones and atrophied muscle, and a stomach swollen from hunger. Eyes sallow. Dark circles. Nails yellow, broken. Hair brittle. The whites in his eyes were dull.