Pink Slime
Inspired by recent headlines, and the thought that you are what you eat...
_ Pink Slime _
Roger was consuming a hamburger for dinner when he heard on the evening news that much of the beef sold in supermarkets was supplemented by meat byproducts sterilized by ammonia, making an additive substance that was called, "pink slime."
"Appetizing thought, isn't it?," Roger asked his cat, Axel, who regarded him curiously. "If you are what you eat, Axel, I'm in bloody big trouble!," remarked Roger as he considered all of the food additives and preservatives that he had ingested over many years. The cat mewed in agreement, but continued to love Roger anyways.
"And to think, Axel, that I eat minced fish and boneless chicken as well! Have you ever seen a 'minced fish,' Axel? Do the oceans team with them?--And wouldn't a 'boneless chicken' be a sorry creature? How could it move, for Christ's sake?!" Axel was unable to come up with an answer.
Roger chuckled at the thought of Gary Larson's 'boneless chicken' Far Side cartoon, showing the pathetic birds oozing over the landscape of a boneless chicken ranch. He extended his arm and gazed at it, pondering all of the strange and unnatural things that he had put into his body over the decades, some by choice but many without his knowledge. As he stared at his arm, Roger noticed that his skin appeared to have become pale and shiny, almost translucent. Staring closer, Roger saw through the skin, observing that his human flesh had become a kind of cytoplasm flowing beneath a cellular membrane.
Roger turned his arm over and stretched his fingers out, but they and the hand and arm that they were attached to continued to extend to impossible lengths. "My God!," realized Roger, "I'm becoming an amoeba-like creature! The pink slime, the years of food additives have radically re-written my DNA!--I hate it when that happens!"
Axel hissed at Roger as his once-human owner flowed from his chair and around the apartment that he occupied, extending pseudopods for locomotion. Mitochondria and other new structures floated inside Roger's cellular membrane where until recently there had been a heart, lungs, liver, and other organs.
A knock then came to his door. Roger extended a pseudopod from his irregularly-shaped body, wrapped it around the doorknob, and exerted downward motion to open the door. There standing at the portal was a magazine salesman, who looked at the gelatinous blob that Roger had become and screamed. Roger responded by rearing up and enveloping the salesman, stopping the nasty noise and beginning thereafter the process of digesting him. He had never cared much for salesmen, and liked screechy loud noises even less. The salesman thrashed and released gases within Roger as his flesh began to be dissolved.
Axel the cat observed his strangely changed master and the unfolding scenario intently. He was somewhat of an ambush predator himself, and was always interested in picking up a few tips that he might incorporate into his technique...