The people of Icon are celebrating their independence just as they have for centuries: with a contest of eaters. It’s hot throughout Icon. The national flags wave upside down on poles outside the pods of some of the people tuning in on their HomeScreens to watch the eaters.
Most of those people actually hunger to watch the contest, need to watch the eaters, or Big Mouths. If they watch the Big Mouths directly, via vid-stream at home in their pods, they will be pumped full throughout the contest via GasLink technology.
The machine is called an Ignatius.
A faceless crowd assembles before the eaters, all wearing foam hot dogs on their heads. They are hereditary, the hot dog headgear, passed down by generations of Watchers. It’s their ticket to watch the eaters in person. Some are stained by long discontinued condiments, relics of Icon’s culinary culture lost to changing tastes and the God-damned bottom line. At least one has some of that awful green ketchup on it.
The crowd begins chanting “Chestnut. Chestnut. Chestnut.”
And so it is, Joseph Christian Chestnut, our Everyman turned Big Mouth. The Big Mouth governing body, Major League Eating, is on record calling Chestnut “the greatest eater in history.” “That is not empty editorializing or bloviating,” their statement reads. “That is empirical fact.”
Before Chestnut, his challenger ate in a world all his own. Fables told of him eating a mountain for breakfast, and a small forest for dessert. After intense immersion therapy involving the consumption of hundreds of hard-boiled eggs and countless soggy lobster rolls, the challenger has now eaten through his personal resentment towards Chestnut. Now, the pair understand each other in only the intimate way that two people who’ve eaten that many hot dogs truly can. After today’s payday, he’s headed towards retirement, and a GasLink all his own.
Between the two a man holds a hot dog microphone. He’s The Host. The Host is compact, has spiky bleach-blond hair. He was a Big Mouth once, traveling far out amongst the Flavortowns of Icon and eating so that the people of Icon could also eat. Could be made full. Watchers see him on their HomeScreens now and they automatically feel hunger. Remember: he’s still cool. And virile. He showed up by driving a muscle car across the vid-stream, his flaming bowling shirt blowing from the wind on the set of a highway.
As has been tradition since the Great Merger, hot dogs are fired at close range at the Big Mouths by Feeders holding hot dog cannons. Feeders study for years, sometimes abroad, all aspects of the art of feeding until they become soldiers, real rank-and-file military types bereft entirely of their own unique personhoods. They’re wearing executioner wear, hoods and all, branded by the one true hot dog company: WeinerOne.
For the record, the Pentagon had been the one footing the bill for the development of the hot dog cannon all along. Originally, they were desperately trying to get people to forget about some tragic toy known as The Lawn Dart. It took the top brass and millions of dollars, but by God, they did it. The cannons were then introduced slowly, placed into local economies under the guise of making baseball more interesting to the people of Icon. And the people of Icon ate that shit up.
After reading a poem (“I am a part of the body’s long madness / I have wandered in various nightwoods …”), the Host screams “HOT DOG!” with the exact panache and cadence of a summertime “CANNONBALL!”
Just then both of the Feeders rip off their uniforms, and embrace in a side hug, revealing a single, scrawled ketchup word across their combined chests: IMPOSSIBLE.
The Host turns towards the crowd, to feed himself from their devotion, their confusion, and a cannon-shot hot dog strikes him in the back of the head near the nape of his neck, at the place where his sunglasses are currently resting. A lens busts, polarized plastic falls in pieces, revealing the familiar rear-facing eye of a RoboCam.
The Host goes down, tries to hide his exposed eye, but the vid-stream caught everything and sent that footage all over Icon. As the pair of rogue Feeders begin firing the hot dog cannon wildly out above the faceless crowd and screaming “Impossible,” the vid-stream cuts out and the Watchers at home are confused.
“Has the Host been a robot all along? And for how long has it been capturing footage?” they ask each other, pulling the GasLink hoses from their housing ports. Across Icon, almost simultaneously, they reached this question: “If there is more eating footage out there that we’ve not seen, then what’s all of this been for?”
They emerge from their pods quickly, all the Watchers running down the streets, chanting and starting the acts of a revolution just before the wind picks up. And even as the mushroom cloud in the distance rises, all across Icon, only the cry of “Impossible” can be heard.
Avery Gregurich is a writer living and working in Marengo, Iowa. He was raised next to the Mississippi River, and has never strayed too far from it.
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