Dinner

It’s dinner.

The table is eating. There’s a photographer. They’re eating humans. Most of them I should say. All except one I should say. And that’s the problem you see. People that eat together, rule together. But she’s just eating her vegies. The host tells her to have a bite of the meat. “I’m good, thanks” she rejects it like she would any kind of meat, with the sort of trained politeness of a long time vegan, the omnipresent social hostility registered and forgotten as it would be any other time. “Have. Some.” the host says more roughly now. The table goes silent, she looks up at him, he’s staring at her sternly, she looks around the table, they all are, same expression. She looks away from the table, at the photographer, his camera lens is trained directly on her. That’s what it’s about. Her eyes move to the meat on the table, her fork to the piece she thinks looks the most digestible, though of course, she has no idea if it is. Her face turns towards the lens and the meat on the fork finds its place between them. Flash. She looks to the wooden table, partially trying to recover her eyes from the flash, partially trying to mentally distance herself as she puts the meat in her mouth. Flash. She starts chewing. Flash. She spits it into a napkin. The table laughs, the photographer leaves. She rinses her mouth and goes back to eyeing her own food, avoiding eye contact. “She doesn’t want to get sick” one of the other women at the table comments, amused. The vegan flashes her eyes at her, before retracting them back down to her food. Her personalized dish makes that much painfully obvious. “All the salads in the world won’t save you in the end, you know” the other woman finishes her thought. The table returns to its previous conversation, dinner resumes.